Why Aren’t You Making More Money from the Internet?

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By Mike Parker

RISMEDIA, Jan. 18, 2007-By now you might be one of the thousands of real estate professionals who are wondering why the estimated 80% of all real estate transactions that begin on the Internet (according to NAR®) aren't finding their way to your Web site.

You might be a doubter that the Internet is really that important in our business. After all, sales are on the rise again, you're doing O.K. and your Web site got you a "lead," once. Let someone else deal with all those people shopping for houses online; the Internet "hasn't changed a thing in the real estate business."

Can you say: "Bookstore?" Can you say "Blockbuster® Video Rental?" Can you even find a non-chain bookstore in your town? Have you heard of Netflix®? These are living examples of paradigm shifts in American buying habits, and like it or not, our industry-real estate-is right up there with those examples as rapidly changing marketplaces. Your neighborhood bookstore is replaced by Barnes & Noble® and Amazon.com®; Blockbuster® has been hurt badly by the next iteration in entertainment, Netflix®. People shopping for homes don't stroll into your office; they sit down and bring up the Internet. That's why 80% of all real estate transactions start there: it's easy, anonymous, and complete and can be performed in the privacy of one's own home.

All this is well-known and our industry spends hundreds-of-millions annually with some good effect. Unfortunately, however, it's the mainline big-time corporate firms and franchisers who have the most money to spend and who can tweak high tech to benefit them first, you second. The question is not "What percentage of real estate sales start on the Internet?" it's "Why aren't you getting more of them?"

Here are three simple possible explanations why your competitor is getting more business from the Internet than you are:

1. You don't have a personal Web site but your competitor does;
2. You think you have a Web site, but what you have is a page on a ‘monolith' site operated by a big-time corporate firm and no one shopping for property in your neighborhood can find you;
3. You do have a personal Web site, but it cannot be found by the search engines, so you don't get traffic.

At the risk of being flippant, if you don't have a personal Web site, you are not even in play. There's no need to address that, here, except to say that you can obtain a professional site absolutely free-giving you no excuse not to have one. If you count as your sole presence on the Internet as your page on a larger site, you are invisible to anyone who does not know your name; if you do have a site that no one can find and is producing no traffic, here's the most probable reason: the tags that enable the search engines to categorize and find your site are indecipherable to the search engine robots.

When someone sits down at a computer to look for a home, do you think that person would ever type in, "Welcome to Prudential of Athabasca?" How about "Classic Cars, Las Vegas?" These are actual title tags I have seen on clients' real estate Web sites.

Needless to say, those Web sites weren't working for their owners. You might not be familiar with these tags, but please let me explain how important these tags are by using a story: Suppose you were blindfolded and taken to Central Tokyo, Japan; where you were instructed to find your way to Shingatsu Station, used by three million people daily. A condition of the experiment is that you couldn't ask anyone for directions; you couldn't use GPS and you could only use street signs to find your way there. Sounds doable, correct?

It's not. Street signs in Japan are written in kanji script, in Japanese, and they are indecipherable to Americans with no knowledge of kanji. Well, street signs on the Internet are written in hyper-text markup language (html) and anything else is indecipherable to a search engine. <Title> and <META> tags are the street signs that enable Sally Homebuyer sitting in her living room at home to find you when searching for homes in your neighborhood. That's why optimization is so crucial: think of a properly optimized HTML tag as your own personal GPS for buyers: they have a fighting chance to find you when you have one.

Many people have invented many ways of attempting to obtain high ranking on search engines, so that when Sally types in "Cozy Home in Pittsburgh" in her e-mail browser search engine, that they are one of the 10 search results that show up on the page.

If you are not on that page and you sell cozy homes in Pittsburg, you are out of luck: one of the 10 people on that page will sell Sally her home. It's a fact that over 81% of people looking for a house on the Internet stick with the first real estate professional they contact. Translation: you need to be found in those first 10 search results.

But, in order for anyone to effect any good position help for you, the first thing you need to do is have your tags optimized by a person who knows what they are doing (click here to find out how to do this: http://theblackwatercg.onelanding.com/). It doesn't cost a lot, but it makes a huge difference in your ability to be found and your traffic will go up gradually and permanently.

You can go upward from there: Search engine placement is a good product (if the person attempting to enlist you as a client can show you five or six customer profiles where their clients are on more than one first page), but not every one wants to spend any additional dollars these days. Everyone can afford optimization, but more than 80% of all real estate professionals are not properly optimized. That means they can't be found by searchers looking for property.

Most clients receive traffic of between 300-7,000 visitors monthly, some receive much more. At a 10% conversion rate, you can see what that means in regard to real, live, good leads. Maybe the reason you're not sharing in the bounty of the Internet is that you aren't using the right tools. Maybe you can't be found by people searching for homes in your neighborhood. Why not make 2007 the year that you join the folks who make sales and listings from the Internet every week? You can be sure that other real estate professionals are doing just that, and you can be sure that some of them are your direct, local competitors. It's your call: Stay lost or be found.

Mike Parker is a principal at The Blackwater Consulting Group, Inc. If you'd like a copy of his booklet: "15 Tips to Help You Make Money from Your Web site," e-mail realestate@theblackwatercg.com. Or e-mail him with questions about online marketing at mparker@theblackwatercg.com.

RISMedia welcomes your questions and comments. Send your e-mail to realestatemagazinefeedback@rismedia.com.

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