Web sites specializing in real estate focus on standing out from the crowd

SAN DIEGO — Call it the real-estate Web portal arms race.

With consumers now expecting to see a comprehensive set of for-sale listings, agents, brokerages, multiple listing services and third-party aggregators are seeking to differentiate themselves from their competitors by pulling onto their Web sites anything and everything from the growing universe of information that might conceivably be connected with a home purchase.

Public property records, foreclosure filings, sold listings data, comparative market analyses, U.S. Census data, demographics, psychographics, school ratings, "walkability" scores, crime stats — it seems hardly a week goes by without a major real-estate portal announcing it's adding to the arsenal of information at the beck and call of users.

"Listings are almost so ubiquitous today, they are not a differentiator," said Sara Bonert, Zillow.com's director of brokers services. Zillow, based in Seattle, has about 4 million listings, and it's become "pretty easy to get them," with multiple listing services (MLS) and brokerages feeding the site directly. "The next question is: 'OK, we've got listings ... what else?' "

Bonert was among a panel of experts who agreed to share their views on the subject during a "Going Beyond Listing Data" panel discussion at the National Association of Realtors' annual convention in San Diego this past week.

Zillow's "Zestimates"

Before it joined the ranks of powerhouse listing aggregators, Zillow created a sensation with consumers by offering access to a database of public property records and property valuations, or "Zestimates" derived from those records. Suddenly, it was possible to go online and see what your neighbors paid for their house — and get a rough idea of how much your own might be worth. Zillow has continued to tweak its business model and offerings to consumers, notably with a mortgage marketplace where consumers can solicit quotes from thousands of participating loan originators.

NAR, seeing an opportunity to get into the business of providing public property records and valuations to its members, has purchased some of the technology and licensed data used by one of Zillow's competitors, Cyberhomes.com.

If MLSs agree to provide active and sold listing data, NAR's Realtor Property Resource database is expected to eventually include records on every parcel in the U.S., residential and commercial, combining public property and other records with active and sold listings data from MLSs and commercial information exchanges (CIEs).

NAR says its property database will be available only to Realtors — helping them to better serve their customers as the most knowledgeable source of information in their marketplace.

But Seattle-based brokerage Redfin, which offers one of the most sophisticated consumer-facing real-estate Web sites on the Internet, recently began offering registered users access to MLS sold data, which the company thinks consumers can use to build their own comparative market analyses.

What does it mean?

As real-estate Web portals make more information available to consumers, it can become increasingly challenging to deliver it to consumers in a meaningful way.

Sites that overwhelm consumers with information may lose them to other, easier-to-use sites. Those that offer a simple interface, but don't deliver the depth of information consumers have come to expect may also find themselves at a competitive disadvantage.

Eric Bryn, vice president of strategic development for the Leading Real Estate Companies of the World, a network of about 600 local and regional real estate firms, brought a mock-up of a hypothetical state-of-the-art real estate Web portal to the discussion.

The site's home page was a mix of elements allowing users to see the results of "long tail" searches with links to pull them deeper into the site; a quadrant displaying a "tag cloud" of neighborhoods where other users are doing the most searches; links to videos about neighborhoods where they might be interested in buying properties; and many other options, including an invitation to follow site updates via Twitter.

Bryn's mock-up had Jim Marks, president and chief executive of Virtual Results, a Laguna Beach, Calif.-based Web site design firm, yearning for something simpler.

"The vendors are all racing to see who can get 2020 technology the fastest," he said. "Your consumers want 1920."

Marks said consumers want to go to a Web site, "crank the handle on the screen once, and their ideal property comes out. They don't want tag clouds ... they don't want to go to school — they want to sit in their underwear and find a home."

Keeping it simple

Information is good — give them as much as possible, Marks said — but in the most simple user interface possible. Most important, a user interface should deliver what consumers expect when they click on it.

"You better give them what they expected, or they are going to bounce off," he said.

Sophisticated Web site interfaces, combined with Web metrics — the monitoring of Web site usage — can help deliver the results consumers expect.

At the other extreme of the simplicity-complexity scale, Bryn cited an earlier presentation by San Diego-based broker-owner Kris Berg. He said Berg has a very simple Web site, but it also includes a chat box capability that Berg says has generated business for her since she installed it nine months ago.

In Marks' view, a chat box — like Yelp or other social media sites — is more 1920 than 2020.

"To me, that's conversation, and referral and recommendation," techniques Realtors have always used to land business, Marks said.

Darrin Clement, founder and chief executive of Maponics, a provider of custom mapping services and geographic information system data, defended the concept of putting power in the hands of users through a sophisticated interface.

"For me, personally, the last thing I want to do is talk to somebody," Clement said. "I want to be in control, navigating that dashboard, so I can do all my research ahead of time and make my decision."

Too much information

While there's seemingly no limit to the type of information that consumers might find useful — the idea of providing earthquake plate tectonics data was raised half seriously — there are practical and legal limits to what sellers and real-estate professionals will find acceptable.

For example, sellers might object to crime data being displayed next to a listing, panelists said.

"What happens when you go to a listing presentation, and the (seller) sees your Web site showing that a sex offender lives in the house next door?" Marks asked.

Spencer Rascoff, Zillow's chief operating officer, who attended the session as an audience member, said Zillow has school data, but not crime statistics.

"The question is: How important do you think it really is for consumers?" Rascoff said.