David DeSantis

With percent range from 80-90% of home buyers looking on-line for real estate, the world is watching you. Your on-line listings directly reflect on you, your broker, and agency. I've looked at listings that weren't even half-butt done, but virtually no effort. Is it really acceptable to post blurry, or blown out pixelated photos on-line? What is the point? To even post those pics on-line demonstrates to your seller an "I don't care" attitude. The seller might as well start looking for another agency. Yes, that's agency, not agent. Think about this, do you think that 80%-90% is just shopping on-line for a home? No, they are also shopping for an agency to list with. It doesn't matter how big you are, or how great your agents are. If your on-line listings are half-butt, then the implication is that your agency is half-butt. There not going to list with you.

Look at your listings, if you're a broker/owner you should be looking at agents listings anyway. How are the listings done? Do they reflect well on you, the broker, your agency, or are they half-butt? I'm speaking from first hand experience when I say this; the agency, that doesn't figure out how to effectively use , and integrate the Internet with their business, will not survive. Realtors are in a very vounerable position right now. If tomorrow an internet savy broker/owner office opened up in your market, and they are aggressive (Sharks). They will take your lunch from you, and eventually cripple your agency.

Dadz Tours recently acquired a rate sheet for the local newpaper. It is for the Sunday real estate section. First, I am not against newspaper advertising. What I am for is realtors rethinking how they are advertising in the newspaper. It is well known that the internet is it! Knowing that, why do realtors continue to spend thousands of dollars on putting pics, and a short description in their ads?

If I was a broker/owner for a day, this is what I would do. Unless you are a very small realtor office, you can't put all your listings on a newspaper ad. I would focus more on driving the traffic to your website, that is where all your inventory is. To do this, it only requires a fraction of the space on the newspaper page. I would simply state the name of the company, contact info, our website address, and mention that we have professional virtual tours of all our listings. It's that simple.

Alright, about the professional virtual tour part. That is important because it tells the potential buyer that you don't just have the run of the mill realtor photos on your site. You've taken your listings to another level, and are serious about selling properties.

What about the saving money part?

You don't need a super big ad to make an impact, and thus a smaller one saves you money.

Yeah but what about the cost of the professional virtual tours?

Let's look at two cost benefit examples for a two month period

ABC Real Estate Company

ABC Real Estate Company has a full page ad with 24 properties on the ad. There are three different options for ads to run in the paper. I'm going to base this example on the middle option. The ad is a colored one, and costs $3,645 to run. That is for one week, and you don't have any professional virtual tours. You change the listings around, and run the ad for eight weeks. Your total cost is $29,160.

123 Real Estate Company

123 Real Estate Company has 50 listings, and they have 50 professional virtual tours done. Their cost is $300 for each tour. There total would be $15,000. With the tours done, they run an ad for eight weeks in the paper. They are focused on getting the public to their site, so they go with an 1/8 colored ad. That will cost them $477 a week, for an eight week total of $3,816. Add the price of the virtual tours, and their eight week total is $18,816. This saves them $10,344 over the traditional ABC Real Estate Companys ad. Plus, they have the professional virtual tours, which unlike newspaper ads do not have residual costs. Take the example further with your own company. When you add up the savings over a year? The bottom line is starting to look much better.

Ponder this over. If you are a realtor, how many buyers have called you and said that they were ready to purchase a home that they had only seen in the newspaper? Now how many properties have been sold only based on their online virtual tour? Guess what it has happened, and will continue to happen. Which Company are you?

I did this article for Boating Industry Magazine. It was published in the June 2008 issue.

It never ceases to amaze me when I read in a magazine or newspaper about a company boasting of how many hits their website has had.

Do they not know how inaccurate that type of measuring traffic is? It’s time to set the record straight.

If you have a website thru a major website provider such as, Channel Blade or MWS, you have access to traffic reports. If your website was built thru an independent company, you may still have access to this report. Some companies charge extra for this, however these reports are very critical. You may have had access, but never looked at these reports. Some of the things these reports tell you is: how many visitors have been on your site, what they looked at, how they got to your site, where they are from, and how long they were on your site. Lets look at some of the different traffic tracking categories.

Hits are the total files viewed on a website for a set amount of time. Your hits for the last month maybe 1 million, but that number is useless as far as a tracking measurement. Here’s why, for each webpage you have, there are multiple files on a page. Lets say that you have ten files on your homepage. Everytime someone goes on your homepage it counts as eleven “hits”. There are ten for the files, and one for the page itself. Keeping it simple, suppose all your pages counted as eleven hits. If a visitor looked at ten pages that would be 110 hits. If you averaged 400 visitors a day that is 44,000 hits a day, or 1.3 million a month.

Visitors are how many people looked at your website for a set time frame. The issue with this for tracking purpose is that each visitor counts as one. If you went on your site three times in one day that would count as three visitors.

Unique Visitors are how many individual times your website was visited. If you were on the same computer the three times you visited the site, only counts as one unique visitor. If however, you went to another computer, and visited your site, it would count as two unique visitors.

Book marked is how many people have saved your homepage as a favorite. This is important because the potential buyer probably has looked at multiple dealer sites, and for some reason yours is important to them. You want to pay attention to this number if you’re in a real seasonal market. Shoppers start looking in the off-season for the up-coming one.

Total Page Views are how many pages were looked at on your website. This is relevant because the more pages they have looked at the more interest they have in your dealership.

Average Visitor Time is how long visitors spend on your site. This is relevant because if people aren’t looking around on your site, there maybe a functionality / layout issue. Once someone lands on your home page you only have three to four seconds to keep his or her interest.

So what should your track? I would suggest: total visitors, unique visitors, total page views, book marked, and average visitor time. This can be done monthly in an excel spreadsheet, and reported to upper management. Referring to the Hawthorne Effect, when something is measured it improves-and when something is measured and reported, it improves exponentially.