Realtors Ready To Serve Influx Of Online Real Estate Consumers - 5/26/2006 - Real Estate Home House Condo

Realtors Ready To Serve Influx Of Online Real Estate Consumers

by Blanche Evans

According to comScore Media Metrix's monthly analysis of consumer activity at top online properties, notable trends in April were the marked increases in traffic to real estate sites, which grew 12 percent from the previous month and 23 percent in the past year. Homestore.com Network and MSN Real Estate led the category with 11.1 and 5.8 million visitors, respectively.

"Americans' interest in real estate sites ballooned recently, due to the general angst in the real estate market and also because of some website innovations within the category. While visitation is up 23 percent versus year ago, the most significant gains have occurred during the past few months," said Peter Daboll, president and CEO of comScore Media Metrix. "With the Fed raising rates and inventories on the rise, potential buyers and sellers are looking to the Internet to assess the current housing landscape."

Supporting the trend, home improvement and home furnishing sites, in aggregate, experienced a 12-percent increase in April over March, with Home Depot's site experiencing a 10-percent gain over March (10.8 million visitors,) and Lowe's gaining 15 percent over March (8.3 million visitors.)

The increase in consumer traffic to the Internet hasn't gone unnoticed by service providers. Zillow.com, for example debuted in February with free home valuations and generated 2.3 million visitors in April, says comScore Media Metrix.

Some category gains, speculates Daboll, "may be symptomatic of a larger trend in real estate -- and the Web in general -- where the idea of 'consumer control' over information is causing significant shifts in shopping behavior."

That's causing significant shifts in Realtor marketing.

The 2006 Realtor® Technology Survey, conducted by the National Association of REALTORS®' Center for REALTOR® Technology shows that the Internet ranks third in generating leads, behind referrals and repeat clients, and ahead of community involvement, and that there is a clear connection between technology spending and Internet-generated leads.

While Realtors have invested heavily in Internet technology, they're spending more in 2006. Halfway through the year, 56 percent of agents spent more than $1,000 apiece on technology and that 30 percent spent $2,000 or more. In addition, 16 percent of agents and 28 percent of brokers are now spending more than $1,000 annually on their websites. Realtors® with personal business websites -- not including an area on a broker's site -- was 71 percent in 2006, compared to 31 percent in 2002, showing a jump of 129 percent.

NAR says that Realtors are leading the way, not playing catch-up to other service providers.

"Consumers are able to use information portals to look for homes to buy because Realtors® have invested huge amounts of resources in technology to make accurate information available on secure sites, thus bringing added value to the transaction. All this information is available to consumers, free of charge, 24 hours a day," said Thomas M. Stevens, 2006 NAR president and senior vice president of NRT Inc., from Vienna, Va.

There's also a direct relationship to the number of leads coming from the Internet and how much money agents spend. Forty percent of those who spent more than $5,000 on their website showed that more than 60 percent of their leads come from the Internet.

However those leads disappear if Realtors don't respond to online inquiries. That said, Realtors® appear to be reacting more quickly to online inquiries. In a surprising change from past surveys and findings, over half the survey respondents indicated that it takes them less than two hours to respond to an Internet inquiry, and only 2 percent indicated that it took them more than a day to respond.

That's a huge improvement over a 2004 survey showing that only 27 percent of practitioners responded within eight hours to an online inquiry and 46 percent of inquiries received no responses.