We have big news to share today. After six months of research and prototyping, and with more than 17,000 users, we’ve officially shifted all of our focus to the Roost Social Real Estate Toolkit.
The consumer property search engine at Roost.com will no longer be accessible as we put all effort and resources into building upon the amazing success our Social Real Estate Toolkit has seen.
We’re proud of the comprehensive and accurate search engine we built for consumers. But, frankly, we came to the understanding that the leads generated from the search product were only of incremental value to our clients. These leads were not of low quality or mispriced; in fact, given the voluntary nature of our leads, they tended to be of the highest quality. But in talking to hundreds of individual REALTORS®, we came to an powerful realization: The vast majority of agents still get 80%+ of their business via word-of-mouth referrals.
Even after all the technological developments for real estate consumers in the last 10 years, this remains the lifeblood of their business. The referral sphere is where the business is done – not blind Internet leads.
That realization, combined with the incredible mainstream adoption of of Facebook and the Social Web over the past year, triggered a thought in our minds: What if we could build technology that helps REALTORS® optimize the 80%+ of their business that really matters?
Months of prototyping culminated in our Version 1 release of the Roost Social Real Estate Toolkit – or the “Real Estate Tab for Facebook.”
After watching that product grow to more than 17,000 individual users and 70 brokerage company customers in a matter of weeks with no real marketing, it became crystal clear that we needed to take this initiative to the next level.
That required us to focus. To prioritize. And so we made the decision to wind down our consumer search engine business.
We’re launching new clients every day, and enhancements to the toolkit have been coming out weekly. It’s an exciting time for us and, we hope, for our customers.
The Roost Social Real Estate Toolkit is easy to use and all about helping you grow the biggest, most productive part of your business: word-of-mouth driven referrals from the people you know and the people who know them.
Check it out now!
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