This is awesome should be done for every one of them!

 You are a marketing genius. And Virtual Results does amazing work. Lori’s site is awesome and I WILL be sharing!

Thanks for sharing Drew, this is a great post!
Most of our real estate agent clients want to use their website as a lead generation tool.  In other words, to take nameless, faceless web visitors and turn them into real prospects.  To do that, we set up their website to capture visitors’ contact information.  Two popular ways to do that are:  1) Through an IDX on your site, which allows visitors to search properties on the MLS. You can “gate” that IDX so that people have to give you their contact information before they can search.  2) Through a home value estimator, which people also have to register to see.
 
Christene Honomichl, Marketing Specialist
http://www.CMRealEstateMarketing.com
 

It would have been cool to hear about actual conversion rates (website visitor to lead)  using different methods, i.e forced registration, hybrids forced registration, calls to action, how many fields in the registration forms etc.  But I know there arent many who have resources to do that type of testing and tracking.

I wonder what the conversion rate is on these different websites?  Like Loris?

Thanks Drew! 

It would have been cool to hear about actual conversion rates (website visitor to lead)  using different methods, i.e forced registration, hybrids forced registration, calls to action, how many fields in the registration forms etc.  But I know there arent many who have resources to do that type of testing and tracking.

I wonder what the conversion rate is on these different websites?  Like Loris?

Thanks Drew! 

Very interesting comments. How do we overcome the value loss by using an IDX that is off site such as idxbroker… very nice IDX but even when you set up the custom domain to try to fool google it does not seem to be even close to as effective as when the idx is actually on your site.

@5fec115f28934030d60d5e9cd7d20db7:disqus   – IDXBroker gives you the option to make a custom subdomain which will give you the “google juice” you are looking for…pages are indexed by Google, and other search engines, are associated with your primary website.

Here is the link to the info http://www.idxbroker.com/support/kb/questions/270/Domain+Control

Thanks for that Tom in regard to the custom domains by idx broker, but one of the systems I have been contemplating is idxbroker due to the fact that it is the least expensive plan out there. Then later when I am a little more able purchase one of the on site idx to get the real google juice. My friend has experienced huge problems getting google to index the custom domain.  For example since you have Zero access to the subdomain you cannot place a sitemap that can be added to your google webmaster tools so that is a major handicap. He was able to trick google into agreeing the custom domain was his by placeing the ownership code in the index page of the main domain and when google looked at his search.mydomain.com idxbroker auto sends you back to the main domain so google did accept it as his custom site but the only site map they offer is search.mydomain.com/sitemap.php and of course that is an html sitemap and of  corurse google will not accept that… Maybe I can get enough folks together to ask idxbroker to add the same site map as xml so google will accept it. That would be a major improvement.  I know that google will eventually crawl the customdomain but its been months now.  And there are tons of custom links on the main blog site but google continues to ignore them. Now don’t get me wrong I have investigated many idxbroker sites and I can see that google will eventually crawl the custom pages but how can he get it moving right away. You seeem to be a fan of the custom pages, have you had good results?
I do see a major problem with the custom… even though we are seemlessly forwarding to the idxbroker site under the guise of the custom domain, google is no fool… if you look at the IP google sees at the customdoamin it is not your regular main IP of course it is the idxbroker ip.. so that means that the 273,000 custom sites out there on idxbroker they all go to the same IP and that is bad ju ju..
Another problem I have during the investigation of IDX broker to decide if I want to purchase is that it is almost impossible to find a single site using the custom domain with a pr above pr1. 75% after a year are still pr0.  Now I am talking about sites with as many as 30,000 custom pages indexed and a thousand backlinks. Just seems that google is on to the custom pages and even though they index they will not process any google juice and give a PR score.  In fairness out of 27,000 custom sites that I investigated on 2 were pr3 and 1 pr4. Now there may be a few more but they are few and far between.
Still after 27,000 sites investiagation.. for the money idx broker still ranks in the top 3 after all that… but of course if you can afford it the only way to go is on site IDX.. but that is big bucks..