I am having my website rebuilt and need to incorporate a few custom searches for consumers visiting my website. Since I am near the lake, I want my prospects to view waterfront homes available in my area straight from my website...however, HAR (Houston Association of Realtors) have made this difficult to do.
HAR recently changed their website to allow consumers to search by lot description - waterfront, waterview, on golf course, etc.. But they didn't change the Realtor codes to allow us to frame the same search criteria into our external sites. Why? I ask. My thoughts originally were that it just may be in the works to allow this and will be available to us shortly after the launch of the HAR site changes. That doesn't seem to be the case AT ALL. My webmaster designing my site met with HAR website division recently and they told him that they have no plans to make this extremely needed capability available to their Realtors. They want consumers driven to their site rather than driven to the local Realtors websites. Why? I don't know, my opinion is maybe the $350 their 20,000 Houston area Realtors pay them annually isn't enough for them. They may feel that the more they compete with their agents with their website, the more website visitors go to their site, and then they can profit on other companies to advertise on HAR.com.
I feel like HAR has cornered the market and not really making it easy for their Realtors to have a buyer friendly website. Even NEW LISTING ALERT systems that so many of us have, no longer lets you set up prospects to receive listings by lot description. They used to, but ever since HAR.com made the changes, it doesn't allow this anymore.
See for yourself, the difference in the search capabilities from HAR.com and the agents link
HAR WEBSITE
http://search.har.com/engine/dispSearchClass1.cfm
AGENT WEBSITE LINK
http://search.har.com/idx/dispSearchClass1.cfm?cid=489131&siteType=AWS
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