Perhaps the biggest news to come out of a relatively sedate annual meeting of the National Association of Realtors (NAR) earlier this month was a push by the national trade group to help agents offer better options for consumers searching for a home on their websites. But some in the industry suggest that the group may be shutting the barn door after the horse has bolted, with more and more consumers migrating their real estate search to smartphones and tablets, and using apps provided by the big portals to do so.
The trade group has announced several tweaks to the rules NAR-affiliated MLSs must adhere to when it comes to providing Internet Data Exchange (IDX) services. IDX allows all the participating broker-members who belong to an MLS to display each other’s listings on their websites, meaning that a consumer who visits a broker’s web page can see the vast majority of the homes for sale in that area, instead of solely the broker’s own listings.
The new rules approved by NAR will allow brokers to display data on three years’ worth of sold homes, as well as requiring the MLSs to update IDX listings more frequently – every 12 hours rather than every three days – and allow brokers to display listings from more than one MLS on their website. (There are more than 900 MLSs across the country, some covering areas as small as a single town or county.)
Along with the IDX policy changes, NAR has also announced a partnership with Boston-based start-up Placester that will allow their members to obtain an IDX-enable search site for a mere $5 per month, in an effort to encourage members to embrace the technology.
In an interview earlier this year with Banker & Tradesman, cofounder of Placester Matthew Barba explained his company’s take on the importance of search, saying, “You can argue that the destination sites [like Zillow, Trulia and Realtor.com] did a lot to help us as an industry get online, but we think there’s a lot more that we as real estate professional can do to take [search functions] back and do it our way.”
A Matter Of Degree
But not everybody agrees. The announcement of the IDX facelift provoked a frustrated blog post from consultant Joel Burslem of the popular and influential real estate marketing and design firm 1,000 Watt Consulting. It’s “time to put IDX out to pasture,” wrote Bruslem, arguing that the very fact that a company like Placester could offer IDX for as little as $5 a month means that the feature has become a commodity, useless for helping agents compete with the cutting-edge tech of the bigger portals, especially as more and more consumers use their phones and tablets to search for homes.
When it comes to mobile devices, consumers prefer to use standalone apps, which are designed to take advantage of touch-screens and other feature of those products, Burslem argues, and local brokers simply aren’t tech-savvy enough to compete with the big portals’ app offerings.
Barba disagrees. “We’ve made a strong bet as a company that the future is responsive websites, and not mobile apps, for two specific reasons. One, it’s painful as a user, if you’re just trying to get a tidbit of information, to have to sign up, [download the app] and register, and search for the property again, just to find out that piece of info,” said Barba.
Second, Google’s Android platform and Apple’s App Store tendency to give prominence to the major national sites isn’t really helpful for consumers, Barba said, when for Boston-based home searcher, a Boston-based agent might be better able to serve them.
“I’d like to see that kind of local favoritism, because that’s the whole point of real estate, of having an agent, that they have that local expertise that you can’t necessarily find on a website. That’s why we’re not in favor of apps as they exist today,” he said.
A Push For Instant Notification
The very fact that the app stores tend to funnel consumers into the major portals’ apps may be helping to strengthen their relationship with consumers who are searching for real estate, and therefore the portals’ ability to generate and funnel leads to hungry agents.
More and more of all consumers’ Internet activity is taking place on phones and tablets. Web traffic tracker comScore released a report this June suggesting that over 60 percent of Internet users’ time on the web was spent on phones and tablets, up from just under 50 percent a year ago. More than 50 percent of the time consumers spent using the Internet was spent using standalone apps, according to comScore.
Real estate-related searches are particularly likely to take place on mobile platforms, as looky-loo consumers drive around through different neighborhoods or check out open houses during the early stages of their home search. Spencer Rascoff, CEO of Zillow, told the New York Times last month that more than two-thirds of Zillow’s traffic already comes from mobile.
Deb Agliano, a net-savvy Medford-based ReMax agent who’s been marketing herself as “Deb on the Web” since 1995, said she’s certainly seen evidence of the shift.
“So many buyers come in, and they’re already using Trulia or Realtor.com,” she said. “They want instant notifications [about new properties that may interest them], which they can get though MLS, but you don’t need an IDX site to inform a buyer that you have something that meets their criteria. Ninety-nine percent of agents still have it, but it’s not as useful for lead generation.”
More and more, “people say, ‘Give me an email, give me a text.’ Everything’s pushed now – nobody wants to wait and go to your website, they want to know instantly,” said Agliano. For an individual agent, having a mobile-responsive that automatically adjusts itself to whatever type of screen its displayed on is crucial, she said. But allowing buyers to search for properties may not be.
Agliano made the switch to just such a site herself last year. “I noticed that over 50 percent of my traffic was coming from mobile. Why would I want to ignore that?”
Email: csullivan@thewarrengroup.com
