It was getting close to Inman Connect NY, and I could feel the urgency in a text message from Matt Beall, ”did you get my email regarding the social media case study for Inman?”

I’m sure somewhere—in the ether that is my inbox—sat an email from Mr. Beall. Knee deep in a Hawaii Life interface redesign, however, my Gmail account was left unmanaged and overflowing its 200G limit.

Since integrating social media into our real estate search in September 2011, I hadn’t really thought about the project. Social (from a business standpoint) was not driving sales, and my mind was on other things that were—specifically a recent surge in mobile traffic led by the iPad.

With Inman looming on the horizon, however, it was time to do a little digging into our social integration project. A text message to Yax, Hawaii Life’s lead programmer, and a few minutes later the Facebook insights installation was complete.

A quick test drive of the Insights interface (Facebook could learn a thing or 2 from Google Analytics) and I was off. 332,828 Facebook impressions in the month of December. Wait…what? 332K impress…ions? Could that be right? It was.

Still, with over 1.2 million impressions in the 4 months since launching the Facebook comment box and other social media buttons, it had resulted in zero trackable sales. But that doesn’t mean that the integration into search wasn’t working, just not how we expected.

Instead of generating leads that turned directly into sales, social media created a platform that allowed other people to share our brand.

Using Social Media to Build Brand

You can learn how Hawaii Life is using social media to build its brand in 2 ways:

1) Short & Sweet - The slides for the Inman presentation in PDF format, sexified by Winny (Creative D / Co-founder):

Case Study – How to (Effectively) Integrate Social Media into Property Search

2) Detailed – The entire report which was used to create the presentation:

Integrating Social Media into Real Estate Search

If you have questions, comment below. I’m sure there will be several. There were at Inman after Matt gave his talk, which I believe (without being bias) was one of the better presentations at the conference.

Say I want to move to New York City from Seattle. What matters to me? A few things:

1. Where do my current friends in NYC live?
2. What type of neighborhoods are those friends located in?
3. Where do my current NYC friends hang out regularly?
4. How far from public transit is a particular unit?
5. Are those neighborhoods safe?
6. Cost

Other sites cover items #2-6 above, but #1 is largely untouched (from what I have seen). Even more so than the buying process, I believe that social data that answers the “where do my friends live” question can — and should — play an extremely large part of the online rental search.

However, for the social data to be utilized, it must be captured. What’s required?

1. All my friends to have “claimed” the apartment unit they live in on the same website
2. I have to be a member of that website, and be “friends” with those of my real friends who live in NYC
3. All my friends need to share their address with the right privacy settings (assuming I am close enough friends with them to get access to it)
4. The website needs to expose the right data via an API to rental search sites
5. The rental search sites need to integrate that data in a way that makes it intuitive to search for properties in the vicinity of my friends

It seems to me that Zillow (my former employer) would be in a prime position to capitalize on this opportunity for a better rental search experience given the following:

1. Zillow has the ability to “claim a house”; “claiming” an apartment unit/building would not be that far of a stretch
2. An existing rental search product
3. A world class development team
4. 25 million unique visitors

But what is up in the air is what would entice someone my age to actually claim their particular rental unit. Owners claim houses because they own them and want to track their homes value over time. But rentals are a totally different ball game. As a renter, you don’t own your unit and really could care less what it’s worth now or in the future (unless your landlord raises the rent, THEN you care). My hunch is, without integrated social context, no one is going to claim a rental unit. And if no one claims units, then using that data to help others make more informed decisions is a bit hard. Quite the conundrum…

Is anyone working on solving this problem? Does the solution exist and I just don’t know about it?

*Photo via Investopedia

Tom West, the central character in the Pulitzer Prize winning book “Soul of a New Machine” once said:

“Not everything worth doing is worth doing well.”

Back in the 70′s, Tom along with perhaps the finest company of computer engineers ever assembled sought to build Eclipse MV/8000.

Under a blistering schedule and tremendous pressure a group of computer engineers needed to design and build a next generation computer. A running theme in the book is the tension between engineering quality and haste: the engineers, challenged to bring a minicomputer to market on a very short timeframe, are encouraged to cut corners on design.

Tom West describes his motto as “Not everything worth doing is worth doing well,” or “If you can do a quick-and-dirty job and it works, do it.”

The super mini computer successfully launched in 1980.  Causing a miraculous turnaround for the ailing Data General.

Dear Reader, I give you the same advice in your online real estate marketing.  In the four years that I’ve been grinding my nose in front of the computer screen — blogging, link building, hiring, planning, brainstorming, writing…you know the drill — the path of  “quick and dirty” as long as it works, as long as it gives you a smidgen of new knowledge (therefore experience), will lead you a step closer to a profitable website.

Not a great writer? Set up a Google alerts on your keywords and fluff the s*&T out of the headlines that pop in your Inbox, until you reach word 300′th.  Do it every day.  Or every week.

Wanna learn about SEO? Choose one and one only — be it David Naylor, Rand Fishkin, Danny Sullivan, Brett Tabke, Sugarrae or Aaron Wall — whoever you deemed in your best guess to be worth following, follow him (or her). And him alone.  Put on your horse blinders.  Not surprisingly, this will illicit naysayers, “Oh, you need a broad focus, blah…blah..blah..blah..blah…”

Listen to me: You don’t have time to listen to all angles.  In our field, you barely have time to eat.  Find the truth and stick to it.  In choosing who to follow, trust your gut instinct on who you think knows their stuff and get to know his strategies, his world view, his marketing — then own it.  Walk in their path as later on you will eventually find yours.  But you have to have focus at the start.

A Realtor in Oakland asked for advice on how to compete with big brand real estate brokers, I told her what I’m sharing to you now — train with the best. When I started in 2007, I wanted to be in the same cage with the heavyweights — the insurance lead guys, online college education affiliates, indefatigable e-commerce webmasters who compete with the Amazon ‘s and Ebay’s, even off-shore gambling lead generators — they were the best, most persevering online marketing misfits in the game (still are).  I desperately wanted to be in their league.  (I detest “pretty face marketing”.)  This gave me the edge in competing in Real Estate keywords.  It wasn’t a walk in the park, but with that mindset, I was a year or two ahead of my peers.

To be clear, I learned a lot from the Teresa Boardman’s, Dustin Luther’s and Hanan Levin’s (Brilliant. Unorthodox. I still ask for advice) — all online real estate trail blazers — but to truly get ahead of the pack you need to think outside real estate and systematically push yourself in learning through experience.  Start making mistakes, start experimenting. Test.

You will go farther than you planned.

(*You can follow me on Twitter)

Recently I began to build my online presence as a real estate agent in my local area, Park City, UT. Prior to doing so, I taught myself anything and everything about real estate marketing, building wordpress sites with idx, basic SEO principles, link building, and anything else I could learn. I started out doing so for my dad who works in the industry and slowly ventured out into running my own business and building sites and marketing myself. 

While researching site options and different ways to construct a site for real estate, I noticed a common trend happening among many real estate sites.  Nationally and locally.

The guys over at 1000 watt consulting wrote about this recently as well stating how real estate search has gotten to complicated and needs to be simplified. There is a reason why 90% of visitors to most realtors sites are just using the search feature. Why do you think companies like Boomtown find so much success for their agents? They offer an MLS search. Nothing more, nothing less. They understand what the consumers are looking for and they offer just that.

Real Estate Webmasters is one of my favorite platforms and I would love to own a site built by them someday. Their new LEC 6 design impressed me so much I keep revisiting the site just to see the layout they have come up with again so I can try to emulate it. I would love for my site to offer that level of simplicity and value to my visitors. The main search feature is prominent, and they only had 3 tabs (in the demo shot although I am sure most agents ad more) . Buy. Sell. Explore. What more do you need? This kind of simplicity is what I believe real estate search needs to be toned down to. Where everything a visitor would like to see on a page is all above the fold, aesthetically pleasing, and SIMPLE.

Often times we offer an absurd amount of features that clog up the site with unnecessary junk. The consumers want to search homes, the quickest and easiest way possible. While we still need proper calls to action and registration pages for lead generation, the rest has plenty of room for simplification.

What are your thoughts on how search has become lately and where the trend is heading?

In the past, I always concentrated on optimizing my web pages for Google first, and Yahoo! and Bing second. That’s because Google’s competitors delivered a fraction of the traffic—making the search giant my go to source. But when Yahoo! threw in the towel and announced that Bing would be powering its search (2009) I knew that Microsoft was going to give Google a run for their money…well, at least close the gap.

Despite recently being busted by Google for copying their search results, Bing has managed to gain 5% market share in February, according to Hitwise.

This is on the heals of a 21% increase for Bing in January. Bing’s gain in traffic is obviously affecting Google who is down -4% over the past 2 months.

Why is this happening? Hitwise suggests it’s because Bing’s success rate (percent of searches that result in a visit to a Website) is through the roof. Bing (and Yahoo!) have achieved success rates of over 81% in the past 2 months, while Google has maintained a 65% success rate.

What’s so important about success rate? When people search, they click to visit websites when the search results match what they’re looking for. So a lower success rate indicates poorer search results. Matt Cutts makes a strong argument that Hitwise’s success rate it not a true measure of visitor satisfaction:

I think the phrase “successful search” is considerably less accurate than “left the site after searching,” because someone can leave a site for lots of different reasons.

Whoever is correct, that fact remains that Bing is grabbing market share from Google, and that Google is on a mission to improve its search results with their latest Panda update. Time will tell if this helps. In the meantime, Bing is giving me more reasons (and more visitors) to concentrate on optimizing for their search algorithm. I suggest doing the same for your real estate website.

In my opinion, advanced Twitter search is one of the most powerful tools on the web, yet it remains one of the least leveraged.  One of the most important features for the real estate industry is the location-based search option.  Using this feature, you can refine your search for people only in your local market who are tweeting about topics related to your business.  Let’s say you’re a real estate agent in San Francisco, here is an example location-based search that I entered for tweets containing the word “realtor” within 10 miles of San Francisco:

And here is the search results for my query above:

While many of the results won’t be relevant, you’ll occasionally get a golden nugget like the tweet by @SFMomsLikeMe highlighted above – “Selecting a realtor in Bay Area-got any tips?” I’m just not sure it gets much more targeted than that.  You know this person is a mom, is located in San Francisco, is in the market for a Realtor, and is seeking advice on how to best choose one.  Seems like a perfect opportunity to tactfully engage them in real-time.  Follow this user on Twitter, tweet at her and point her to the valuable information you have on your blog/website about the local market.  You get the idea, use this as a window to share helpful knowledge with the goal of proving that you’re the best Realtor for the person you’re reaching out to.

At my local services start-up, SkillSlate, we’ve had some early success reaching out to and engaging with prospective members for our site by conducting location-based Twitter searches on the various categories of service providers in our test market of New York.  I hope that you can leverage similar practices as outlined above in order to better leverage the powerful hyper-local capabilities that Twitter offers in order to grow your business.  Good luck!

Before the test, all three sites were not allowing the property pages to be indexed, but were using our integrated IDX solution that tracks all pages views of every property the user viewed while searching.  (Note: Most framed IDX solutions would not be tracking those pages a user is viewing as part of the sites traffic. That is why page views of a site that uses a framed solution and then converts over to an integrated one go up drastically.)  Once the property pages of the three sites were indexed most of property pages had top 10 rankings and the traffic increased dramatically.

Below are the combined average numbers and results after the property pages were indexed. You might be surprised, I was.

-    48% increase in new unique visitors. (major increase in traffic)
-    Overall site bounce rate increased by 25%. (30% to 37.5%)
-    Page Views per user dropped by 28% (9.5 to 6.84)
-    Number of sign ups or conversions remained about the same.

The tests we ran show that the traffic will definitely increase if your site has enough authority to get top rankings for the individual property pages, but the quality of traffic seems to be low.  The bounce rate on property pages compared to city/area real estate pages seems to be drastically higher and have a very low conversion rate.

SEO Advantage or Disadvantage? You be the judge. We did not see an increase or decrease in rankings on the city/area real estate pages or the home page for their keywords due to having the listings indexed. I have heard that search engines like Google are now comparing bounce rates as one of the many ranking factors.  I am not sure if they look at the overall bounce rate of the site, a specific page or combination. That may be something to ask an SEO expert.

I think there are much better ways to drive quality traffic that converts at a much higher rate than indexed listings. I don’t think they are going to hurt you and may actually help you get a few extra deals. If you have an IDX provider that offers index-able IDX listings, I would definitely take advantage of it , especially since we were not tracking phone calls that may have come in due to someone searching for a specific property.  (Having indexed listings is more affordable advertising than in a paper or magazines any day!)

I am going to continue to keep my property pages indexed even though the quality of traffic appears to be low.

I know it is inevitable that I will be asked (perhaps 100′s of times) “What did you learn from Inman Connect SF this week”? or “What was the most interesting thing you learned at Inman Connect SF”? or some variation of that general question. In years past I may have made something up to illicit a response like “That’s Nice” or “Wow, that’s great!”, but NOT this year!

This year something very accidental, yet incredibly enlightening happened and it all began with me accidentally walking into the wrong “MeetUp”…

It was like a Bad episode of “Reality TV”

Wednesday at ICSF was jam packed! Stuff happening from the morning bell to the 5pm cocktail call. I was constantly looking at my playbook, trying to decide where I was going…What topic? What room? What subject? It was crazy! So right after lunch I knew I wanted to go to a “MeetUp” of Real Estate Tech Vendors in Continental Parlor #2, that started at 1:00pm. Now the MeetUps were not necessarily open to the public, though they were not marked “Private” or anything, but they were designed for the Vendors to congregate and talk amongst themselves regarding what they were experiencing in the market. This MeetUp was Facilitated by a friend of mine, Greg Robertson from W&R Studios (Cloud CMA), so I knew he would let me “Sit in” on it. After all, I am a Techy!

So off I went on my merry way at about 1:10pm, feverishly typing away at Twitter on my phone, into Continental Parlor #1 ( for those of you who have had your morning Starbucks you probably got it, but for those who have not…I said Parlor #1!). Now in Parlor #1, I was not sitting in on my intended MeetUp, Real Estate Tech Vendors, but instead I was “Transported” to some unknown geographical location somewhere in the 1950′s … It was titled “MLS Operators, Vendors, and Staff” DA DA DUMB! (Cue the music from the 1950′s classic TV show, Dragnet!)

“Son-of-a-bitch!” I thought, I gotta get outta here! but I couldn’t. Something was mysteriously keeping me from moving, it was as if I were paralyzed. The conversation was about the “Consumers” (Keep this meaningless term in mind, it will come up again) perception of our Industry. Specifically, at that moment, about how when they see Listing data in multiple sources (MLS, Trulia, Broker Sites, Agent Sites ect…) that is not the same (different price, Sold vs Active ect…) they say “How stupid is this?”

That’s when it got interesting ….

Think Hatfield’s & McCoy’s, Shark’s & Jet’s, Snoop Dawg & Puffy!

Ok, so I will be the 1st to admit, I have a limited knowledge of the inter-workings of the MLS’s. I am however a keen observer of human behavior, and the overall atmosphere in this room was … hmmmm … What’s the right word? Depressing? no Frustrating? no oh wait… I’ve got it! EMBARRASSING!

Though the Facilitator, Marilyn Wilson a Partner at WAV Group (@marilynwilson), did her best to mediate, like a Beverly Hills divorce case, this was no small task. Don’t get me wrong, there were no punches thrown, no “F” bombs were dropped, nothing uncivilized, Though two MLS operators (one who resembled that Scottish Guy from Austin Powers movies & one who looked a bit like Santa Claus in the off season, ya know, beard was trimmed dropped a few pounds, but the whole grey thing was working for him) felt it was an appropriate venue to make off-color remarks regarding their sex lives. Then there was the MLS guy (who looked a bit like a character from The Sopranos) who felt very comfortable stating that “Brokers are the REAL problem, they refuse to fire the 53% of their REALTORS (c) who are a bunch of Morons and haven’t done a single transaction in over a year” that was kinda weird, being it had seemingly nothing to do with the conversation…other than that…oh wait…

The reason we are headed for Government regulation of our Data

… The room also had a number of bright young minds, from Tech start-ups, some Exec’s from 3rd Party Aggregators, and a few representatives of the Broker/Agent community. These folks were asking for some cooporation in areas like:

• Sharing of Data in more Open fashion
• Involvement by the MLS’s in a Rating system for Agents/Brokers/Affiliates/Aggregators
• More “Open-Mindedness” to new Technologies & Ideas
• An Intranet for the MLS’s to communicate with each other about questionable Vendors
• A more “Open” forum for New Vendors to present ideas

Ya know, Stupid stuff like that!

Each and every time a bright young mind in the Vendor community, or a Consumer Advocate, or a Forward thinking Broker offered a suggestion (some of which, to me of course, were awesome) they were met with the same response from The MLS Boys…”Good Luck with That!” and then came the round of “Belly Laughs” (led by Scottish Guy, Santa, & Soprano Guy)…at first I was amused by them myself. then when I realized that they came from a deeply rooted “Arrogance”, rather than a playful sense of “Humor”, I was faced with the realization that our Industry was “doomed” to be regulated. No one, and I am convinced, No one will be able to get these two opposing sides (Old School & New School) to join together and bring our industry into the 21st century.

The “Straw” that broke the “Consumers” back

It was all made so incredibly clear by a comment from “Soprano Guy”, in response to the statement from Marilyn Wilson “it’s abundantly clear, from all the polls, that the Consumer overwhelmingly wants the Rating System”!

Soprano Guy then blurted out “Who”? “The Consumer”? “That’s not my Customer, The Brokers are my Customers. They pay my bills, not the Consumers”.

In Closing…

You never know what life has in store for you. One minute everything’s all “peaches & cream”. You’re minding your own business, happily “Tweeting” about that nights cocktail parties, or the crazy new Technologies you just heard some Geek talk about on stage and then …. BAM! … Your visions of your industry’s future are shattered by a room full of “Closed Minds”…though it was “riveting” and certainly more interesting than the “Meet The Leaders” segment downstairs, it was then and will forever be my most disappointing “Wrong Turn”

I don’t know how this gets fixed. I just know somebody with the “Schwag” to do it needs to get involved and fix it!

If not, Obama (or the next elected leader of our country) will!

Stay Blogging My Friends!

@TheRECoach

There’s been a lot of chatter about some of the newer listing scrapers and IDX wordpress plugins and what they can do, and what the value is or isn’t of having a spiderable IDX products.

I’m interested in this topic because I got a spiderable IDX in May of 2009 from Real Estate Webmasters. So far the numbers look good, but I want to know what the potential is, and whether people’s concerns about the topic have any validity. So, for my own research (and yours), I’ve decided to do a case study on my blog that looks at the effects of having a spiderable IDX on my site, and on sites that have higher authority than mine. I’d like to see where my traffic will be in a year or two!

Also, after reading all the posts at Active Rain and Geek Estate Blog, I decided to speak with Morgan Carey of Real Estate Webmasters to see if he could answer some of the most common question/concerns regarding spiderable IDX.

Question: If I have an indexable IDX, will I get a duplicate content penalty if others also have an indexable IDX?
Answer: No, that’s a myth. From Google itself: “Let’s put this to bed once and for all, folks: There’s no such thing as a ‘duplicate content penalty.’ At least, not in the way most people mean when they say that. Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results.” Furthermore, although it is true that everyone is starting with the same “data set” – not everyone will implement it as effectively or in the same manner. Diversification and creativity makes having this kind of data hugely valuable if leveraged correctly.

Question: Will a spiderable IDX help my site compete with the big guns (Redfin, Trulia, Zillow etc.)?
Answer: Yes of course. It’s weird – folks seem to be thinking now that the “cat is out of the bag” about spiderable IDX (we have been doing it for over 6 years btw, it’s hardly new) that there is “no point” in having spiderable IDX because companies like Trulia or Zillow also have spiderable listings (many powered directly by MLS feeds),so don’t even try to compete. The fact of the matter is – there is a very small amount of these super powerful aggregators out there, and there are 10 spots on the first page of a search engine. Even if you couldn’t outdo these sites, why not be in the fray? #4 for any keyword on the first page is really not a bad place to be. That being said – although these sites from a “domain” perspective are very powerful – they must distribute this power to their most popular / desirable targets and cannot possibly dominate or even focus on all listings in all areas. Many times just by having a spiderable IDX and a decent site, our customers easily outrank the big guns on address and MLS # related searches. One thing is for sure – without spiderable IDX – you aren’t even on the field, let alone in the game.

Question: I have a high authority site, great rankings – if I add spiderable IDX how will this change my stats?
Answer: Well, check out Jay Thompson’s case study, or take Gary Ashton‘s site. Gary got a spiderable IDX at the beginning of January, this year. You’ll notice the massive jump in the number of pageviews on his site:

His traffic’s also increased over the previous month by about 45%, while his bounce rate has dropped by 36%. Users are spending about 2 1/2 times as long on the site, and they’re exploring an average of 8 pages on the site, whereas before when he had an iframed solution, people were only visiting about 2 pages on the site.

Question: I have spiderable IDX and I only have a few hundred pages indexed – why not all of them?
Answer: Chances are you do not have the authority (domain) required to keep that many pages indexed. A solution is to improve your overall pagerank, and also work on your internal linking and architecture as much as possible to leverage the pagerank you do have. Still not the end of the world though – that’s probably 350 more pages driving traffic to your site than you would have had without it. Chin up – keep building links and working on your site structure, and your pagecount will reward you with a ton of long tail traffic over time.

Question: There are many websites (with as much or more pagerank as me) in my area that have spiderable IDX. How can I compete?
Answer: Again, build your authority / pagerank is step one – whoever has the most juice (domain) has the best chance. However, there is something to be said for differentiation & augmentation. If you can come up with creative ways to rewrite your information using algorithms (titles, meta data etc.) so as to provide a “different look” (layout) and additional information on the page, then your chances are far better to generate additional long tail traffic than those simply using “out of the box” spiderable IDX. Also try to find unique ways of getting your users involved – does your MLS allow after-listing comments? Why not have users contribute comments about their favorite listings, thereby adding valuable visitor-generated, “unique” content to the page?

Here’s a question brought up by Jeff Corbett: Does the SEO value evaporate, since everyone will effectively have the same content?
Answer: I would say that everyone needs to make sure that outside their IDX data, their site has unique, quality content, period. This will help differentiate your site from the rest of the pack. As for the listings themselves, as I mentioned above, you can modify your titles and meta data to make your listings different from everyone else’s. Focus on the basics of good SEO, and the listings will only help your site in the rankings–as well as improve user experience. BTW – unless you are in a market like Austin, TX where everyone seems to be on the ball (example http://www.jimolenbush.com), then chances are you only have to compete with 1, maybe 2 sites – again, although it’s not exactly a secret, it’s also not like anyone is taking advantage. How long exactly do you want to wait before everyone but you does have spiderable IDX and there is actually some competition? Life rewards originators.

Question: Is there anything people should be aware of before they decide to get a spiderable IDX?
Answer: Realtors should stay away from IDX vendors with RSS feeds – these people are violating the NAR’s guidelines with respect to their obligation as vendors to protect IDX data from scraping or misappropriation. If the MLS board was informed (and educated as to why) RSS should not be allowed, chances are they would pull the feed. Furthermore, any solutions (such as the DS IDX wordpress plugin Jay Thompson references in his post) – should be avoided as well. My feeling is that because these plugins put complete control into the hands of untrained webmasters with no regard for regulations or compliance, the various boards will very soon pull the feeds (and perhaps the vendor agreements) of those not adhering to the quality standards expected of IDX vendors. The boards already have enough problems with members reporting members on items that are not even real issues. Imagine what will happen to a board’s compliance staff once these IDX’s (now in the control of untrained webmasters / Realtors) start gaining popularity. The MLS board is going to have so many legitimate complaints, they will virtually become buried. They obviously don’t want that, which is why they have “approved” vendors and a compliance process in the first place. Any spiderable IDX company however that does have a compliance department, and is responsible and “accountable” with regards to the MLS boards’ terms of use should be fine.