The Real Estate Experience
What frustrates me about this industry from time to time is that, when the discussion revolves around staging techniques, pleasing home inspectors, and other superficial gimmicks to try to sell listings, what’s being forgotten here is that to be successful in real estate, agents and brokers need to cater to their homebuyers throughout the home-selection process by providing a truly remarkable, personalized home-buying experience.
Let’s talk about experience. When a home buyer comes to your site, their experience with your brand starts the second they begin searching for a potential home and continues from this initial touch point to the tailored search results, to meeting with an agent, and finally to buying their perfect home.
Throughout this experience, Realtors need to listen and cater to their home buyers’ needs as far as what their end goals are, what’s driving their home selection process, and what do they want in their next home. For example, home buyers are more and more so moving for job-related and family-related reasons, and less so for housing-related reasons. Providing potential homes that are compatible with a home buyers’ job or family-related needs (and showcasing what specifically makes those resulted listings qualify as perfect homes) is what can make an experience remarkable and impactful.
Now, you can take all of this information and build it into your platform. But it doesn’t stop there. At the end of the day, it’s how they experience your brand as a decision support provider so every single time the home buyer engages with your platform, your agents, or yourself, it should be an experience that they’re pleased with and one that you’re proud of.
By focusing on providing the best experience possible, you gain mindshare, loyalty, and support from your potential home buyers. At the end of the day, that’s the experience that sells listings.
Are you willing to do what it takes to get there?
Will Wertheim
Posted at 09:33h, 17 JuneNot quite sure what you’re saying. Could you give examples of improvements you’d like to see? Is it a branding exercise or a tech/tools exercise?
Marc Siden
Posted at 10:22h, 18 JuneWill, I have no idea what I say half the time. I thank you for taking the time to challenge this. Simply put, this is less about fighting the data wars, using gimmicks etc, and more about the experience someone has when interacting with you and your brand. Are you helping to answer their most critical questions? What is my commute time? Where will my kid go to school? Who are my neighbors etc. Building trust means building blocks to a long term relationship that I know every agent desires. As I said- it starts when they shake your hand.
Many sites continue to miss the mark and understand that providing this mission critical decision support is the foundation to everything this industry says it wants. I continue to wonder why we are still here. Meaning most sites are one size fits all.
No one buys a house the first time they go to a website- why is the property search so overwhelmingly front and center?? Yes it becomes the focal point, but there are other things we look for before we can find a home. If we take the focus away from just selling and put that energy into the buying experience, I think we will see a huge improvement.
Marc Siden
Posted at 12:32h, 18 JuneWill, I have no idea what I say half the time. I thank you for taking the time to challenge this. Simply put, this is less about fighting the data wars, using gimmicks etc, and more about the experience someone has when interacting with you and your brand. Are you helping to answer their most critical questions? What is my commute time? Where will my kid go to school? Who are my neighbors etc. Building trust means building blocks to a long term relationship that I know every agent desires. As I said- it starts when they shake your hand.
Many sites continue to miss the mark and understand that providing this mission critical decision support is the foundation to everything this industry says it wants. I continue to wonder why we are still here. Meaning most sites are one size fits all.
No one buys a house the first time they go to a website- why is the property search so overwhelmingly front and center?? Yes it becomes the focal point, but there are other things we look for before we can find a home. If we take the focus away from just selling and put that energy into the buying experience, I think we will see a huge improvement.