According to recent reports by Borrell & Associates, real-estate brokers' and agents' websites are losing online market share of the real estate listings marketplace. They report that certain keyword real-estate searches have recently began to ignore most of the Realtor Websites in the search engines.
According to Borrell, real-estate agents' websites now populate Google's top 10 results only 9% of the time, vs. 29% only a year ago.
Newspaper real-estate sites now get in the top 10 about 12% of the time, vs. 16% a year ago.
To quote the popular song...."isn't it ironic"?
Realtor offices and agents pay their local and national Board of Realtors, Department of Real Estate and National Association of Realtors to protect them. Yet these lobbyists only serve to create the napster affect thru the IDX and VOW initiatives.
Yet, in many of the cases, the Newspaper sites that are beating the pants off the Realtor in search engine referrals, are getting the data from their friendly, local Realtor.
Does anyone in the Realtor community care that your "advocates" are giving your business away?
OK so here is the bad news. The above mentioned report is from a year ago (Dec, 2003). And the search engine environment has only gotten tougher as Google seems to have given way to relevancy and would rather you spend your money on their ADWords.
In September of this year Borrell released a report called:
2004 ANALYSIS: ONLINE REAL ESTATE ADVERTISING COMES OF AGE. A superheated home-sales market has masked some subtle shifts in the $11.5 billion Real Estate advertising category. Homes are selling faster than agents can advertise them, and a new, less expensive way of reaching home buyers has emerged in the form of MLS-based Web sites. Meanwhile, an erosion of traditional media advertising -- particularly for newspapers -- has been occurring. In 1997, newspapers received $755 per home sold in advertising revenues; today it's $605. This report examines the shift and and provides additional insights from surveys with classified advertising, online managers, and MLS executives.
