The Top 5 Benefits of Hyper Local Real Estate Listings
One of the most important roles you and your agents play in each real estate transaction you facilitate is being a trusted expert. Clients expect you to be an expert--not just in the real estate industry, but also your local market and area. They're relying on you to help locate properties that check all their boxes: budget, neighborhood, amenities, lifestyle, and more.
There are many ways for your team to demonstrate your local expertise: stellar showings, well-written listing descriptions, customized neighborhood pages on your website, and blog posts featuring local businesses and events. The sky is the limit!
But even then, there are still questions you might not be able to answer. How walkable is one neighborhood compared to another? How do schools rank against each other? How does it really "feel" to live not just in a particular neighborhood, but on a particular block?
To help your team answer these questions, Constellation1 recently partnered with Local Logic to provide location intelligence tools to our websites customers, allowing them to take what it means to make listings local to the next level and wow homebuyers.
What is location intelligence in real estate?
Location intelligence is the practice of analyzing geospatial data to uncover insights about a particular place. The technology is used extensively in urban planning, healthcare, higher education, transportation, and real estate, and real estate professionals can use it to add an extra layer of depth and analysis to their listings. How far away are the nearest grocery stores and veterinarians, down to the foot? What are local schools like? How does the place "feel" when you're there? Location intelligence can tell you!
Here's how adding location intelligence insights to your listings can help your brokerage or MLS:
Improve search engine optimization
Constellation1's websites and MLS portals are already search engine optimized to drive visitor traffic, thanks in large part to strategically coded pages featuring information about local neighborhoods, school districts, demographics, and more.
Providing location intelligence data further improves SEO by teaching search engines like Google that your listings and content are even more relevant for people searching in your area.
Bring in more leads
Better SEO means more website traffic and more conversions through saved property searches, newsletter signups, and form submissions. The real estate industry has a challenging road over the next 12 months and beyond, so attracting and converting every lead you can will be all the more important for you and your team.
Provide a better search experience
When looking for a home, potential homebuyers have a lot of questions. Some of them can't be answered simply by driving around the neighborhood. Location insights that are easy to understand and tailored to the exact location where home seekers are searching means they can find the answers to their questions and listings they're crazy about, not just lukewarm.
Sell properties faster
The faster a client finds their dream home, the shorter listings are on the market. That translates into faster closes and a steadier stream of commission income.
Keep agents and consumers happy
Agents want tools that make their jobs easier: more leads, smoother sales, fast closes, and happy clients. Clients want to know they're in good hands, and that starts from the moment they click their first listing. Customer-focused information and superior listing searches backed by the best data in the industry help build trust and loyalty in your team and let clients know you take serving them seriously.
Get location intelligence for your websites
Ensure your listings stand out from the competition with the most powerful location intelligence tools available today. Current Constellation1 customers can talk to their account representatives. Not a Constellation1 Websites customer yet? Request a callback from our front office team and learn about all the ways our unique broker, agent, and MLS websites will take your business to the next level.
To view the original article, visit the Constellation1 blog.
MORE >
RETECHNOLOGY PREMIUM MARKETPLACE RELATED PRODUCTS | WEBINARS | SPECIAL OFFERS
Cybersquatting: New potential problems, and possible solutions
It's hard to believe that almost five years have passed since I posted on this blog about cybersquatting, or typo-squatting. You can read that older post to get the basic ideas; but the examples I gave there no longer work. (I foresaw at the time that my post might prompt action by the broker I used as an example; I'm glad I was right.)
As I noted in that older post:
A common problem in the industry is that large brokerage firms are great targets for cybersquatters. According to the Anti-cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (15 U.S.C. 1125(d)) or ACPA, cybersquatting, or cyberpiracy, is registering, trafficking in, or using a domain name identical to or confusingly similar to someone else's trade- or service mark in bad faith. The most common form in our industry results in folks registering a domain name that is a slight variation of a broker's firm name (also called "typosquatting"), putting up a page on the resulting domain, and selling real-estate-related links on the page. In most cases, this violates the trade- or service marks of the broker and may violate the ACPA.
You should be prepared for a whole new wave of problems associated with cybersquatting in the coming couple years, as ICANN (the international regulator of Internet domain names) has received nearly two thousand applications for new top-level domains (TLDs), the part of a domain to the right of the last dot: e.g., .COM, .NET, .ORG.
MORE >
Is the MLS In Danger?
I do not really know Alain Pinel as well as I would like to. He sold the company that bears his name and pursued other interests. He is back now and runs the Luxury division of Intero Real Estate, one of Alain Pinel Real Estate's chief competitors in San Jose, along with Coldwell Banker and others. What I do know of Alain Pinel I like and respect a lot. I have a similar level of respect for the maverick efforts of Intero, who used passion combined with technology (AgentAchieve) to launch a powerful brokerage in a very competitive marketplace.
In a blog post today, Alain Pinel asked – Is the MLS in Danger?
He says:
There are signs suggesting that the MLS is going through some mid-life crisis.
[Non MLS transactions are] depriving most local REALTORS® of the ability to objectively judge values and trends.
Listing agents who bring only a few of their peers in the loop, can nevertheless achieve the objective: the sale. They may even argue that the fact that they cooperate with only a few creates some urgency among the select group.
We must respect the seller's decision to withhold a listing from the MLS.
[The MLS] has its own agenda.
You may wonder if the tail (the MLS) is not wagging the dog (the Broker). One thing is sure; the tail (The MLS) is now bigger than the dog (the Broker).
Many brokers think that the MLS is now eating their soup, somewhat competing with their business, and too zealous regarding new constraining rules.
MLSs which offer all their members a vast menu of state-of-the-art apps which compete with similar services that the finest companies created, at great cost, to differentiate themselves from other brokers.
More and more syndicated sites and real estate related service providers, which feed off of the MLS, progressively divert the consumer from our sites to theirs and capture value-pieces of our business.
MORE >