Continuing my thoughts on real estate websites and online reviews, we come to a site that has recently been marketing itself extensively. You may have seen the television commercials with Elizabeth Banks, which have bolstered the site’s visibility among consumers substantially. It doesn’t hurt that the site’s domain name is as clear and simple as can be: Realtor.com
Realtor.com has a lot going for it. It has a clean, modern layout, and naturally is exclusively about real estate matters, unlike, say, Yelp. It contains a plethora of user-friendly, simple tools and resources for buyers and sellers alike, and its abundant articles ensure a constant influx of new content. The scope of the site is as wide as you want it to be, dealing with everything from local matters to national news. It even offers help in finding rentals and mortgage brokers! In short, Realtor.com operates in large part as the model of what a real estate website should be.
Now let’s discuss the most relevant part for agents: our profiles. Realtor.com makes finding an agent very easy for potential clients, and the profiles they provide are both visually appealing and convey some great info. Make sure to keep your profile updated and, if you have one, link your blog or Facebook page to your profile so that potential clients can get a good sense of your online presence. Realtor.com automatically pulls info for your recent listing and sales activity, showing everything at a glance to make a strong initial impression upon visitors. The profile also makes it easy to directly contact agents or share their info with others. It basically has its bases covered in providing everything you would want in a profile.
I know everything I have said so far has been pretty glowing, but I would be remiss if I didn’t note the downside of Realtor.com. The trouble is, at least for the time being, it isn’t quite at the level of usage that Yelp or Zillow enjoy. It arguably isn’t as well-known as Redfin or Trulia, either. Steps are obviously being taken to address this (hence the aforementioned marketing blitz), but right now, at this moment, Realtor.com doesn’t seem to be as widely used as the websites we have previously discussed. As such, exposure is more limited. Now, there is a very real element with clients that often gets overlooked: review fatigue. It’s oftentimes hard enough to get a client to write a single review for an agent; asking them to do multiple reviews across multiple sites is a herculean task, even if they’re only copying and pasting the same review. People are busy, life is fast-paced, and someone taking the time to write a review is a precious thing. As such, when directing a client to give a review, the most widely-viewed sites must be prioritized. The unfortunate fact that comes with this is that Yelp and Zillow are simple higher-priority targets. Look in the screen shot at the top of this article, and you can see that it reflects no reviews for me on Realtor.com despite my hundreds of transactions through the years. Ideally, this would not be the case, and this wonderful site would be overflowing with the same sort of positive reviews I have received on Zillow, Yelp and Facebook. I’m working towards that, but it doesn’t seem that we’re quite there yet. Though I do very much respect what Realtor.com has accomplished and hope for it to continue to flourish (it certainly has the tools to do so), it currently falls short of the absolute top tier of websites in terms of exposure. I hope it continues to grow to the point where this is not the case.
If you would like to get the ball rolling on some Realtor.com reviews for me (and I very much would appreciate it if you did), here is the link to my review page there. Please help me out with a short review if you can!
http://www.realtor.com/realestateagents/Elena-Johal_Los-Gatos_CA_239491_297789108#/
So those are my thoughts on Realtor.com, a great site with some growing to do. Next time, we’re going to discuss another site for which growth has not been a problem, to say the least…
TO BE CONTINUED…