REMAX.com Gets a Facelift
Remax.com recently got a revamp…
The site looks pretty good at first glance. There’s a clean home page, detailed information on the listing detail pages, and a way to look up home values (using Homes.com’s AVM is looks like). It’s all great — but I still can’t help but wonder what they view as their long term differentiator with consumers? What can a buyer or seller (or home owner) do on Remax.com that they can do nowhere else? What unique content assets are in place? Is this enough to get people to switch from Redfin, Zillow, or Realtor.com?
Note to anyone on REMAX’s tech team reading: the home page is not geolocating me correctly. The “real estate activity in…” module is showing properties from Denver (I’m in Seattle).
Greg Fischer
Posted at 16:53h, 25 AprilReal estate search is beyond parity. Same houses/more websites.
Large brokerages need a method to drive leads, and home search results is the way they do it – which makes it critical to have a modern interface for users (at Remax scale). Conceivably, they figure out how to drive leads cheaper than through (or in conjunction with) third party advertising and use this site as the conduit for this purpose. This is just one part of a large broker advertising strategy.
Interesting you ask “Is it enough to get people to switch from Zillow” because nobody “switches”, most users will use any search site that has a house they want to look at and submit as many lead forms as it takes to answer questions they have. (Yes, even on the worst agent websites you’ve ever seen).
There are no significant differentiators when displaying real estate listings to the transactional buyer. Period. But remember – we’re not usually talking about transactional buyers in discussions like this.
Property portals are about generating leads. If the experience is fun/useful – the user might come back and submit their lead into the funnel when its time to move down the stack. Let’s stop pretending property websites are missing their chance to differentiate or offer alternative experiences that drive value to the user.
At the end of the day, their purpose is to generate leads that keep transactions in their silo and move users into relationships with brokers.
Search is dead. Long live search
Drew Meyers
Posted at 17:09h, 25 AprilTouche, Greg.
Maybe it’s a fairly tale that buyers actually care about the website & it’s really just a race to the lowest cost of lead & getting an email/call to follow up on as fast as physically possible.
Mike Patton
Posted at 07:43h, 26 AprilI really had hopes of RE/MAX advancing the user experience. Something along the lines of what 1000 Watt did at this site: http://1000watt.net/2016/02/designing-a-new-seller-lead-tool/
Jeff Manson
Posted at 09:33h, 26 AprilTI went and played around on it and the usability is horrible. Not a very good experience.