The StreetAdvisor Pitch to Sellers
We redesigned StreetAdvisor a few weeks ago, and put a larger focus on appealing to sellers for reviews, the individuals with the largest financial interest to make their neighborhood more appealing to buyers.
The pitch: “Maximize the selling price of your home by sharing what you love about your suburb to increase its appeal.”
We also put a large focus on the fact that StreetAdvisor is where buyers and renters should turn to research which neighborhoods are best.
I know there are listing agents who read this blog. My question for you is what would incentivize you to instruct your sellers to leave a review of the neighborhood or city their listing on StreetAdvisor?
Any thoughts or feedback on the site are welcome.
[Disclosure: StreetAdvisor is a consulting client of mine]
graymoment
Posted at 19:08h, 28 FebruaryWithout a clear and obvious answer to that question, I think it will be difficult to get listing agents to promote a neighborhood ranking website. You might get agents that are hyper focused on a neighborhood to have a vested interest in getting the homeowners in a specific neighborhood to boost the ratings of that neighborhood, but I don’t think that’s a great plan in the long run for the credibility of the site. Unless the neighborhood rankings reflect the actual opinion of the general population, users who stumble on the site that are familiar with neighborhood differences (which is probably most people other than people relocating to an unfamiliar area), will dismiss the site’s validity.
My first question would be what major problem is this site trying to solve?
Who is the intended user that would need it? I’m guessing it’s intended for people who are unfamiliar with where they are looking to move to, which would be relocation buyers.
This is just my opinion, but I think differences between neighborhoods are not best represented by scores. It’s more about what are the qualitative differences between the neighborhoods. What kind of people live in this neighborhood versus this other neighborhood? Are they the same age as me? Do they have a similar lifestyle? Do I even want to be around people who are like me? Those are tough answers, but I think those are the question that most people would have when deciding between the neighborhoods in an area they already live in and are familiar with. Outside of the more obvious differences like price, affordability, “value,” etc.
Drew Meyers
Posted at 19:41h, 28 FebruaryI think you are correct in terms of the local nuances being the critical part, and not just scores. I think you’ll see there is quite a wealth of that content in the reviews: http://www.streetadvisor.com/search/neighborhoods-in-seattle-king-county-washington
The major problem is certainly for those with no real knowledge of the area (relocation buyers like you mention).
In terms of reviews, it’s generally true across the board that any review site, on any topic, primarily gets content focused on the bad side and the good side and not much in between. SA get lots of organic content from individuals who don’t like the neighborhoods they’ve lived in (but those people don’t read this blog so didn’t mention anything about it in this post) — so it’s not all the rosy content from agents with a financial interest in it.
Sam DeBord
Posted at 09:33h, 29 FebruaryYou’ve hit a good one on the hyper-focused local agent. All reviews and scoring sites are gamed. That doesn’t mean they won’t draw traffic. You need evangelists to build local content (that appears to be the goal). Even if it’s cheerleader content, it’s coming from a local with insights that can’t be produced by an algorithm.
This could work in the way that Zillow got community information/photos in the past. Power users were rewarded with some kind of points system for contributing local content. Maybe that generates greater visibility for that user’s profile.