Uses of websites of effective real estate marketing

Journal of Real Estate Portfolio Management, Apr-Jun 2000 by Bond, Michael T, Seiler, Michael J, Seiler, Vicky L, Blake, Ben

Moreover, from the brokerage industry's perspective, it makes more sense to have one large website rather than thousands of individual smaller sites. This substantially reduces search costs for buyers and sellers and should therefore improve efficiency in the real estate brokerage industry.

Seventy of the 208 respondents plan to have a website in the future (see Exhibit 1). While most firms either currently have listings on the Web or are planning to join the Web, only 16.1% stated that they cannot see the benefits from using a website. Moreover, 4.0% of respondent firms stated that they had websites in the past and that the sites were discontinued because they failed to generate sufficient business.

Of the forty-one firms that do maintain a website, thirty-eight do so because the Internet provides another way to reach potential customers. Twentynine firms also stated that it is simply the way business is done today Nineteen indicated that they had a website because of a fear of otherwise losing business to those who do have one (see Exhibit 2).

The average site has been operational for just under one and a half years and gets an average of approximately 440 hits per day. This number is extremely misleading, however, because the median is only 5. One firm receives 5,393 hits each day, while half receive 5 or fewer. The average number of properties available in the broker's coverage area is 1,654. Again, this is affected by size as the median is only 320. The average percentage of properties that the respondent firms list on their site is 36.4%, with a median of 17.5%.

Any time property information is listed, there is always a chance that it contains some type of error. This is true whether the listings are on the Internet, in print or on television. To examine the rate of mistakes on the Internet, respondent firms were asked what percentage of their listings contains errors of any kind. The average reported is 10.3%, with a median of 5%. Firms were next asked to report the percentage of their site's listings that are still on the site yet have already been sold or are no longer available. This type of stale listing is certainly possible in print and television ads as well, but due to the extremely low marginal cost of leaving an outdated listing on the Web, keeping all listings current might not be watchdogged nearly as closely.

The mean percentage of self reported stale property listings is 2.81%, while the median is 0%. When asked how often brokers update their pages, 78% indicated that they do so at least weekly The least frequent updating is once per year. Since one out of every five brokers update their property listing information less frequently than once per week, it seems inconsistent that over half of the respondents reported a perfect deletion record. Therefore, the 2.81% is extremely likely to be biased downward.

Providing a picture of the property on the website would seem to be a necessity, yet six firms have sites with no pictures. Most, however, do have at least one picture (median = 100%) of the property. In fact, the average number of pictures of a property is 1.47 and the median is 1.00. The reason for the limited number of pictures on real estate websites is clear. Unless the web user has a cable connection to the Internet, it takes far too long to load pictures over a telephone line. As advances in technology continue, look for the number of property pictures to increase substantially Eventually, it is expected that a virtual reality walk-through of the entire property would be possible allowing for a greater ability to pre-shop before on-site visits are necessary.