Audi A4, searching for a car is like searching for real estate This past weekend I was helping my wife search for a new-used car.  As I am the designated “car guy” of the family I was happy to pick up the cause to look for a vehicle.  The used car market is pretty soft so I was definitely hunting to find a deal.  After searching through a few websites I felt like I easily could have been searching for real estate.  

There were a few problems that I ran into while I was searching: 

  • Different websites returned different available vehicles (i.e. AutoTrader.com vs. Manufacturer websites that list dealer inventory)
  • Not all vehicle specifications were displayed on the listings
  • It wasn’t easy to figure out what financing was available
  • Vehicle pictures were often too few to get a good idea of what the vehicle actually looked like
  • It wasn’t easy to find contact information 

After running through a good number of websites and digging for more information, I felt that our customers in real estate probably feel the same way.  They run into many problems and often just get tired of searching. 

Eliminate problems on your real estate website 

So what can we do to make their life easier?  Let’s look at the problems we had in our car search and eliminate those problems in our own websites. 

  • Different websites return different vehicles - Make sure your website doesn’t just feature your local office listings.  Get an IDX solution that returns all of the results for your entire MLS area.  This way your visitors never have to visit another website, they can use your website as one stop shopping.
  • Not all vehicle specifications were displayed on the listings - Although you can’t control exactly what your MLS displays, you can control what is displayed on your featured listings.  Make sure to provide the key metrics people are looking for be beds, bathroom, square footage, and lot size.  If you can provide even more detail like how much parking the garage accommodates then you are doing even better.
  • It wasn’t easy to figure out financing was available - Although mortgage calculators can be annoying, provide links to them on pages where you talk about prices of homes or on your featured listings.  There are some great mortgage widgets out there that you can incorporate into your pages as well.
  • Vehicle Pictures were too few - This is something you can over come in your neighborhood pages, pages on condo complexes, and of course your own listings on your website.  Give people a clear idea of what it is like to be in the property or neighborhood.
  • It wasn’t easy to find contact information - Of course the dealers wanted you to call them (much like agents) but rarely did I see a place where I could just fill out a form to ask some questions.  Make sure your phone number is easily displayed on each page and make sure you have quick and easy to contact forms so you can start a dialogue with prospects over e-mail. 

As real estate professionals with a desire for success with online marketing, I know we can tackle these challenges.  It just takes some small actions each month and we can provide an experience to our next customer that is easy and fun online.

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