Give Em’ A Feel

There is a lot of talk by a lot of smart people in the real estate world about having a good home search tool on your web site. Unless you are still sharpening a pencil with a stone, you understand that consumers want to search for homes online when they come to your site. Yeah, I know your dog is cute and you are a big time million dollar producer and all, but most of them just want to search. I promise.

So, there are many different ways for you to allow them to search for homes on your site and many different vendors that want to take your money to provide a GREAT search for the consumer. I can’t tell ya’ what the best search application is for you and I’m not looking to get into the whole IDX debate, but I am pretty sure you need to do something.

You agree? Great. Now what?

They can search but can they get a feel for the neighborhood? What kinds of tools can you use to give em’ that really good feel? I have been asking myself that for a while now and have been experimenting with a few different ways. I am pretty serious about this real estate geek stuff and want to try to continually learn what is available and what consumers look for when online.

For now, I am trying some new things to give consumers more information than a simple search. Yeah, you can build a site around a niche market like I have done telling people about areas surrounding the Phoenix light rail line and have a lot of fun. A couple other things I have been working on are different ways to tell a story about a neighborhood.

Let me give a couple of examples. ( MANY other tools are available, these are just a few)

I happen to think South Tempe has some really cool neighborhoods. In reality, a consumer, especially one that might be a referral from another great agent selling homes in Loudoun County which is half a world away from Tempe, would have a hard time knowing what life is like in our area. So, I have been playing with using Google Maps and Flickr to try and paint a better picture of life in Tempe. For instance: The map below shows an area that I recently named, Camelot Corner.

View Camelot Corner Tempe AZ in a larger map

Within Camelot Corner, I have identified six different subdivisions that are close to each other and have some unique similarities and yet, they have very distinct differences. I came up with the name of the area because two of the six neighborhoods have the name Camelot in them with the very nice, Camelot Village being the largest one. While these neighborhoods are nice, many people feel the location and the neighborhood amenities help make it special. Adding buttons to show a park, restaurants, shops, freeway access, etc. might help someone identify with the area a little better. I still have a lot to learn about Google Maps and I want to add schools and other things in the near future, but I have had fun getting started with building several of these pages for my site and am in the process of building a bunch of them for the Rail Life web site. We need to add descriptions of the businesses, better links on the subdivision pages, etc. and will do so as time permits. That’s another great thing about a web presence, it can always be improved. :)

Taking the neighborhood pages a little further, I have started playing with individual listings and incorporating similar ideas. By building a web page for a listing, we can point a domain for the home and put that domain on a for sale sign for the property. Below is a picture of a great home in Parke Tempe that recently went on the market. By adding  a Flickr slide show to the community page, we can let people know what types of homes are in Parke Tempe but can also show restaurants, parks, etc. So far, I am pretty happy with the reactions we are getting and will continue to tweak, as necessary. This individual service can be costly and time consuming, but it has been well received by people I have talked to and has helped me rank decent in some of the communities when looking at a Google search.

My fondness of Flickr comes from some friends I have met in real estate circles and I hope to keep adding things to Flickr that interest myself and others. Theresa Boardman sells real estate in St Paul Minnesota and does an amazing job in telling people about her community. In addition to the slideshows and photos, I also have been using some video to embed in pages. I’ll keep working to get that better as we try to determine what seems to work the best.

Another cool thing about Flickr is the fact that you can create groups for people to join. Heck, a group for a neighborhood could be used to ask people to contribute shots of restaurants, shops, and schools in the area. That could get kind of fun if the community takes an interest.

So, give it a try and give em’ a feel for your community. Yeah, it takes some time, some effort, and maybe a little bit of imagination, but you should see some results if you let people know how much you care about an area….