With about 80 percent of all homebuyers now turning to the Internet for help while they shop, Realtors are finding their own ways to take advantage of the trend.
One Denver broker has even begun charging his colleagues to manage their ads on craigslist, the popular free online clearinghouse, and to monitor the traffic those ads generate.
Mark Cramer, a broker at Coldwell Banker-Devonshire, charges other brokers $39.95 per month to re-post home listings and related pictures every three days on craigslist. Because the pictures are kept on Cramer’s private computer server, he can count how many times they are viewed by potential clients.
Craigslist, www.craigslist.com, has been touted as the world’s seventh-most-visited website, with about 3 billion hits per month. Users search through bare-bones home pages to find cities or regions they’re interested in.
Ads are posted by date in egalitarian fashion, so re-posting or updating an ad keeps it closer to the top of the page, where it presumably would be seen by more people.
“My wife (also a Devonshire broker) and I have found a lot of business that way,” Cramer said. His posting service includes proprietary software that he unveiled publicly for the first time last week at a Coldwell Banker convention.
When asked about Cramer’s service, craigslist president Jim Buckmaster issued a terse e-mail response: The company has discussed charging customers for some ads in some markets, including real estate and job ads, but so far has not done so.
“Charging customers for placing free ads on craigslist is banned by our terms of use,” Buckmaster said. “We have no plans to charge for anything in Denver for the foreseeable future.”
Because Cramer is charging his customers for data entry and management, he believes he does not go against the website’s terms of use.
Denver-based Metro Brokers Inc. recently decided to launch a website, ColoradoHomeStop.com, that shares with consumers information about all homes on the market in Colorado. The real estate company’s 2,000 members paid more than $2 million to develop the site, which is expected to someday incorporate the state’s 22 multiple listing services.
“Younger clients go out and do the legwork online,” Cramer said. “A lot of people thought the Internet would completely blow the Realtor out of the equation, but given the complexity of contracts and the changing nature of the contracts, I don’t think the Realtor will ever not be part of the process.”
Surveys at the National Association of Realtors show essentially the same thing, said spokesman Walter Molony. About 80 percent of consumers now look online first when they want to buy a home, compared with 2 percent in 1995, Molony said. Some 80 percent of real estate firms now have their own websites, he said.
“One of the projections was that the Internet would disintermediate (cut out the middleman), and the number of agents would drop precipitously,” Molony said. “Our agents have mushroomed. People who use the Internet as a tool are more likely to use an agent to close the transaction for them.”
The trade group’s survey, from July 2005 to June 2006, showed 53 percent of buyers go to some sort of metro area website to research an area they’re interested in; 52 percent go to www.realtor.com; 41 percent go to specific real estate company websites; 40 percent go to individual agent websites; 14 percent go to newspaper websites; and 6 percent go to magazine websites. The total is more than 100 percent because respondents said they checked more than one venue, Molony said.
In the survey, 36 percent of buyers first learned about the homes they bought from a real estate agent, compared with 24 percent from the Internet, Molony said.
“People cast a really wide net in looking for a home. They do the process, they do their homework, then they contact the real estate agent,” Molony said. “The agent is more likely to find a better match.”
Big real estate websites:
: real estate listings online from Metrolist Inc.
: National Association of Realtors’ website includes real estate listings
: newspaper classifieds for metro area and mountains
: free, similar to newspaper classifieds, including real estate categories
: free, similar to craigslist
: Google search engine’s free service similar to craigslist
