The relaunch of RealEstate.com happened last Saturday, March 3rd while many of us were sound asleep. I would wake up Saturday morning to get my first look at the new live version of the portal that we believe is going to give consumers and agents an experience unique to the major real estate portals out there.
Here are a couple of the key differentiating factors. These are the things that we believe are unique about the new RealEstate.com.
1. RealEstate.com is Photo Centric:
From the home page, a simple clean opportunity to explore, all the way the local info pages, full of easy to read graphs and charts, RealEstate.com is all about the pictures.
Any good real estate website is going to let you see pictures of homes. That's a no-brainer. With RealEstate.com our designers used tones on the page that are very neutral and light in a deliberate effort to make any of the other images on the page jump off. This is true of the photos for listings but it's also true of the sponsors banner ads and the calls to action. We're very confident this clean muted look for the site will bring maximum exposure to the houses and the professionals on the site.
Also, we have some really cool stuff planned for the way consumers interact with and save photos of homes they like on RealEstate.com. The experience of searching for a home online is really encapsulated by how someone connects with the photos of the homes they view. As professionals, it's incumbent upon you to make sure your images are the best they can be. As a real estate portal, it's our job to make sure we give the consumer a fantastic way to interact with those images.
2. RealEstate.com is Clean and Simple:
Our pages are intended to get the consumer the information they want. If they want to connect with a local professional, those options are obvious and available. There isn't a bunch of other ads or distractions on the page to draw the consumer away from the sponsors or the information they seek. There are no ad networks, no "punch the monkey" ads or really anything on the page to distract you from the info on the site itself.
Take a look at some of the other major portals out there and see how much 'stuff' is happening on any give page you land on. You can be easily distracted.
3. RealEstate.com Has Only One Agent Sponsor per Page:
Take a look at the other major portals out there, you will find anywhere between 4 and 12 'featured' 'showcased' 'exclusive' '(fill in the blank with some ultra hip term)' agents on the page. This is a bad experience for both the consumer and for the real estate professional(s) sponsoring the page. And sometimes you have to search to find those people, but once you do they are grouped together with multiple different sponsors or advertisers.
RealEstate.com sponsors are always present on the page. No matter how far down you scroll, RealEstate.com sponsors follow the visitor on the right hand side of the page. And there is only one person per page. We don't 'showcase' or 'feature' multiple people. We want the consumer to have a clear choice about what agent to contact if they need help in a certain area.
4. RealEstate.com Has Accurate and Up to Date Listing Information:
RealEstate.com will not be an aggregator of listing data from a broad variety of sources. We intend to go the primary source, the MLS. There will not be feeds coming in to RealEstate.com from third party syndication sites and junking up the site or over-inflating the inventory with sold listings and properties that are no longer on the market.
Because of this insistence on getting it right, we will be going across the country and forming relationships on an MLS by MLS basis. That means that at launch, we don't have listing data for every single market. That's alright, it was a decision we chose to make in an effort to ensure that when we do get the listings, when consumers do use RealEstate.com to search for homes, they know the data is valid. We don't want you saying to your clients "Don't use RealEstate.com to search for houses, there is a bunch of outdated listings on there and many of the homes are sold". We know you have to say that about other sites, we don't want you saying that about ours.
5. RealEstate.com will have a Broad and Diverse Media Campaign:
RealEstate.com is already a top search result for general terms like: real estate, home values and home for sale. But that's not enough. We are investing in strengthening our organic placement and believe that we have the knowledge and experience to get RealEstate.com ranking exceptionally well across a broad spectrum of organic search terms.
In addition to that, Market Leader has one of the best search engine marketing teams in the entire real estate space. The search engine marketing team has been managing thousands of campaigns for real estate agents and brokerages with amazing results. Using that expertise, we will be running pay-per-click campaigns and a variety of Social Media campaigns to drive brand awareness and traffic to RealEstate.com.
And then don't be surprised when you see display advertising and some offline branding in the near future.
Overall I'm super excited. ActiveRain has given me a taste of having a major player in the real estate website business. Our members here have made ActiveRain more than we ever could have imagined it would be. The community here will continue to develop and I will continue to be enlightened and made a better human because of my involvement with ActiveRain. But with RealEstate.com we have a chance to tackle the big boys head on and that's an opportunity I'm thrilled about and relish.
I hope you can see why we are excited based on some of this differentiation and we are going to keep our noses down and keep improving until RealEstate.com is the first place consumers think of when they want information about something to do with real estate.
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