Help for Sarasota Home Sellers - Internet Usage and the Home Buyer
This is part 3 of a 3 part article to help Sarasota Home Sellers (or any seller really) find a buyer for their home.
We've already established the Internet's importance in finding a home, but its use and opportunities as an advertising method are actually greater than they appear. According to the NAR Study, 87% of home buyers used the internet to search for a home. Of this group, 77% drove by a house that interested them and 63% actually walked through a home they saw on line. No other form of advertising is going to get results like this.
When asked about the value of the internet, home buyers sited the following benefits as very useful:
- Photos 86%
- Detailed property information 84%
- Virtual tours 68%
When you consider alternative marketing avenues, nothing else provides an opportunity to provide this information to prospects. To get the photos and information provided by the web into a newspaper ad or a direct mail piece would be prohibitively expensive. Even then, the quality of the photos could not compare to the web.
In terms of website preferences, buyers showed a more diffused set of preferences and most used more than just one site. Those websites included:
- MLS websites (presumably those sponsored by local Realtor boards) 60%
- Realtor.com (the NAR website which is essentially the national MLS database)48%
- Websites belonging to a real estate company 46%
- Websites belonging to an agent 43%
- For Sale by Owner site 19%
- Newspaper site 11%
- Other sites with listings (Trulia, Zillow, etc) 25%
Each week, I prepare a report for each of my customers (Sellers). The report shows website hits for 4 websites, MLS agent views, MLS agent emails sent that included the customers listing, showings, sign calls, etc. My experience has been that Realtor.com gets 10 times the hits as any other website. There could be many reasons for this.
My theory is that prospects use Realtor.com until they become somewhat more knowledgeable about the area and then switch to a website with more local flavor. Many local area websites, mine included, allow for a much more granular search than is afforded by Realtor.com. For example, my site not only allows users to search by neighborhood, but provides links to specific neighborhoods or buildings. If you want to see what is for sale in Seaplace on Longboat Key for example, you just click that link on my site and all MLS listings are displayed.
The bottom line is that there is not one place called the internet. You need to have your home on a variety aof sites to achieve maximum exposure.