Becoming Everything to the Consumer on Your Website: Creating a Real Estate Mash-up

Dale- I hope things are not too bad with the Jeep. Zoomf is in the UK market, but you know it is easy for them to come here if they wanted. Zillow has been looking for us inspectors to go over there an participate. It is also amazing what is available out there for us when building our websites. Have a good day checking things out on the web.

Joan- it is nice to see you. After I wrote that post, I found a series of posts by a search marketer (Stoney De Geyter, I think his name was) who was using the term "destination site" and "destination search marketing", and I realized that was the concept which I am playing with. I am certainly glad that AR and your site are working for you.  I was just hoping to explore what we may be able to do with a website to take it a step further.

Kevin, I had a reason for putting this post in HIC. I was looking at the number of searches related to keywords and keyphrases involving home inspections. From my limited resources, I found a rather bleak picutre at the moment. Over the weekend two clients stated that they were not planning to have an inspection, because they wanted to save the money. I think we inspectors need to be making our sites a real hub for homeowners, which can help them realize how important we are. I hope that my efforts will help my colleagues here.

Kevin, what is happening with licensing of inspectors in Ohio? Is the legislature going to go that way?

Kevin, I understand about the legislatures. Unless a representative has an agenda, it does not seem that anything gets done. We are finally updating our SOP in Texas after discussing that action for many, many years. It looks like we may get a new one next year.

Joan- there always is Dale :) Even with licenture a Realtor should check out their HIs carefully. This past week I started working with a new Realtor to me. She told the client it would take me about two hours to inspect a 2600SF home. She said that most take 1 to 2 hours to inspect homes. I just cannot see doing it that fast. I found that one firm was only doing partial inspections, but they did not explain that fact to the consumer.It was not the Realtors guiding their clients away from an inspection (in both cases the Realtorss wanted an inspection), but clients wanting to save money.

Personally I like the system in Texas and other states that attempts to ensure that an inspection is held to a certain standard and that an inspector is held to a standard. I am not fond of ASHI or NAHI, but they do hold their members to a standard, so choosing an inspector from those groups is not a bad idea.

Linda, thank you for coming in. I think making our sites a reference location on local matters is a good way to spread our message as well as our service. That is why I am looking into such programs, although I will not use them all.

Christina, it is always a pleasure to see you here! I wish you the best of luck with your marketing efforts.

Rich,  NAR had been preventing internet brokerages access to the MLS. The finalization of the lawsuit now forces NAR to give them that access, so it is not quite open yet. If the DOJ lawsuit is successful, it would mean that the MLS would be open to a greater extent. Internet brokerages are experimenting with new business models, which could conceivably reduce costs and how a real estate transaction occurs, but it may not be the best option for everyone. If these brokerages become larger players in the general market, it could mean changes overall. At this time though, these brokerages are suffering financially, and they have not expanded to become larger firms over the country. As the internet advances, it will be the impetus for change in our buisiness models, so it is interesting to see how that might happen.

Rich, I had read her post, and I do agree. In the end, we each have to find our own way to reach the consumer in a way that we can best serve them. What I like about the internet in general is that it offers so many ways to access information; however, this can also be a problem in the respect that some methods do not offer the best options for the consumer. I just looked at a survey which found that on average, visitors to our sites only read 16% of a blog post. To me, this shows that we have to make the connection with them quickly, and we have to present the facts that they need clearly, so when they skim the post, they will find it.

By the way, I saw your post on Homescape this week, and I liked it. I was telling people to go there to read it.

Bonnie, I know the feeling of swimming against the current. First, I hope that you are doing well. I have been a bit busy lately, so I have not taken all of the steps that I had outlined in the post. I am just about to begin an offline campaign to drive people online to a survey that I created with the LimeSurvey app that I mentioned, and I am trying to build up my forum (which I changed to bbpress, which is also open source from Wordpress). My next step is incorporating the search engine to find homes. I have been hanging out on search marketing blogs to get some more ideas. I should write a post about Google Insights for Search, and how to use it for blog titles (I have been experimenting with that and geotargeting in blog titles).

Christina, it is nice to have you drop by. Although Yahoo's BOSS is more appealing to me, I think Zillow's API will be more useful to the consmer, so I am going that route. I am hoping to do that next week between everything else.

To you both, have a wonderful Sunday.