Onboard and the Lifestyle Listings Engine

Thanks Drew, I appreciate your perspective.

In addition to helping prospective home buyers understand which areas within a community best meets their needs, we are offer them the ability to identify which home within a community matches their lifestyle. For example we can help a young family with children find a home within 30 minutes commute to work, near parks/playgrounds, a variety of entertainment options, and safe neighborhood.

Subsequently based on the user interaction we are capable of providing more insight via enhanced leads to the broker/agent on their prospective home buyers and market.

I don't think it is a question whether the consumer is ready for lifestyle searching, it is just a matter of actually having a technology company that can pull it off effectively.

The consumer is more then ready. Why? Because people buy homes based off emotion. They visualize themselves living there before they purchase, they picture themselves raising a family there.

Keeping lifestyle in mind is an essential part of shopping for real estate. People want to visualize their lives in a new home before a purchase. And unfortunately we are all still selling a picture, a virtual tour, and the basic stats. Buyers want more! Give it to them already.

On our new web site: www.prusantafe.com, we are trying to focus on lifestyle and make it a core focus of our site. It is rather difficult to pull off however because we are all still stuck in an old MLS system. Beds, baths and square footage; its only part of the equation! We need to evolve beyond that. How do you truly integrate what people dream for in a perfect house and be able to present that sales pitch online?

Its all about the amenities. Walking distance to stores, restaurants, schools, the views, being able to have horses, there are so many variables to play off of. The only way we can do that is if the data fields are added into our MLS data streams. Or another company pulls in the MLS data and aggregates the info with their own custom lifestyle database. Or goes rogue and builds their own database and let the listing agents feed you with the listings. My guess is they may have to do just that, getting an IDX feed from some MLS boards is ridiculously hard.

I just wish the MLS boards and providers were required to innovate and implement as quickly as all of us real estate companies that are in survival mode have to in this difficult market.

Its not a questions of if... its only a questions if it can be done properly.

I look forward to seeing the Onboard’s Lifestyle Listings Engine launched. I am hoping all involved have good success with their new product.

I would have to agree with Brian-I think home buyers will be more than ready for it so long as it can be implemented smoothly into real estate websites and search engines.

What a wonderful feature a "lifestyle" search could be! I see this being great for people coming out of school and relocating. In our economy, there will soon be a huge number of laid off people relocating to take new jobs in less hit areas.

I agree, consumers are interested in maintaining a certain lifestyle when searching for a home. It gets tricky implementing that into a search and keeping it SIMPLE. There are a lot of agents sites that have a standard IDX search that are hard to use and very confusing.

I would be interested to see how this can be implemented.

Thanks for the post Drew. Great to meet you at Inman.
In response to the relocation buyer. Imagine the additional ability to do a lifestyle search not by the neighborhood you want to be in, because as you point out that would be difficult, but predicated on the neighborhood you currently live in. Just like we take our current community data and provide community comparisons, within this search you could potentially build it out to ask for the customers current county, zip, town or neighborhood and then show them comparable neighborhoods in the new location.

Imagine...

I appreciate the good word, Drew. Brian, you've exactly put your finger on it by saying that right now property search is completely disconnected from the emotional context of finding and buying a home.

Take your site, for example. Clean interface, engaging, clearly about engaging the buyer on an emotional level (even the color scheme)--right up until you try to do any kind of meaningful search. This isn't a knock on you at all, Brian, because you've done a great job with what's available. The problem is that what's available for search is just not that great.

We think we've found ways to solve that, and the general consensus at Real Estate Connect seemed to be that we were headed in the right direction. If we can help RE create compelling user experiences that result in meaningful searches that start genuine conversations between broker/agents and their consumers--everybody wins.