Optimizing for the Home Buying Cycle: The Selection Stage

Home shoppers can spend months on multiple websites as they transition through the four Home-Buyer Life Cycle Stages of Discovery, Research, Selection, and Closing. In our Optimizing the Home Buying Cycle series, we uncover all the ways to align your website to the needs of each of these four stages in order to deliver a consistently optimized and impressively effective home shopping experience.

So far in our series, we've unveiled how to optimize your site for both potential home shoppers who are casually daydreaming about their next best place as well as serious home shoppers who've delved into the heavy research for their next home.

In the third stage of the Home Buying Cycle, the Selection stage, the home shopper has decided on an area or two they would like to live in and is in the process of selecting and securing the perfect listing. Essentially, in the Selection stage of the Home Buying Cycle, it's crunch time.

To meet the needs of home shoppers in the Selection stage, the biggest necessity is to have the most accurate, up to date listings as possible. After all, if your listings are not updated on a regular basis, why would serious home buyers keep returning to check on daily or even weekly updates? Even further, once your website is updated with the listings that have been available for a week or two, there's an increased probability that a local or national competitor has displayed the listings long enough for their loyal home shoppers to close in.

To avoid this, offer real-time listings. Listings API +, for example, is the first API to provide real-time listings by undergoing multiple listings updates a day. Through this offering, your home shoppers can be the first to receive real-time access to listings as they enter the market, offering them an advantage against other home shoppers and offering you increased engagement and brand loyalty.