Have you ever been so moved by a movie that you watched it over and over until the experience fully saturated you? I recently had that experience reading a recent blog by 1000Watt Consulting  titled “The Level Playing Field is a Wasteland.” I came away from it thinking, wow, they sure hit the target. I wonder though if they didn’t miss the bullseye.

Every organization wants to provide a level of service that is fairly offered to its membership. Brokers and agents however are constantly striving to set themselves apart. This creates that playing field wasteland described by the 1000Watt’s blog posting.

While this fits well when comparing local real estate solutions, it doesn’t translate when comparing local to national Internet solutions. I’d like to argue that you can level the playing field if everyone played by the same rules. In fact I believe the local solutions have the advantage. Let me explain.

I never understood why a broker would freely syndicate their listings to national sites with minimal restrictions, while maintaining stiffer restrictions on themselves via IDX and VOW. The current antiquated IDX and VOW rules limit what a broker or agent can present on their own website while there are no such rules for national sites.

Zillow Zestimates are a perfect example. Zillow started Zestimates based on inherently inaccurate public records. They are inaccurate because state law allows for inaccurate sold price data to be recorded. A homeowner wishing to hide the price they paid can report it as sold for $1. This creates havoc when a computer generated estimate is done on surrounding homes.

The MLS system however tends to have the true sold price since it effects commissions making for a higher level of accuracy. This data is only available via constraining VOW rules requiring a consumer login.  If you were the consumer would you 1) go to Zillow anonymously to get what you think is an accurate estimate or 2) log into a broker site thinking its no better than what Zillow provides? Zillow wins every time.

What if the rules were changed to level the playing field with these national sites? What if the VOW rules were thrown out? What if IDX allowed for anonymously viewing of all listing data (active and solds) while maintaining the rules that ensure the data is accurate and credited appropriately? Imagine giving the local broker/agent sites the same power that national sites enjoy by a simple revision of the rules.

Just the thought of that kind of opportunity has me thinking of at least a dozen new ideas. Multiply that by all the real estate techies out there and you get the idea. Competition would benefit the REALTORS® directly with their new innovations. After all, doesn’t every REALTOR® want to be the winner at the end of the day?

There I go dreaming again…

Heunox Corporation has been providing real estate website solutions since 1996. One day in October 2006 everything changed. This article provides a glimpse at how ListingNotes was born.

The Pop: October 2006

I can’t remember the exact day that it happened, but one day in October of 2006 I sat staring at my monitor with a sick look on my face. I kept checking and rechecking our West Michigan real estate web logs. Hours later I finally came out of the office and sat my partner, Kris, down and told her what I discovered. The real estate bubble had popped and Michigan was first to feel its effects.

I went on to explain my crystal ball prediction. The auto, print and real estate industries would tank first. After all, print was already in decline. Next would be the mortgage companies that would then pull down banks. Finally, the credit cards would be hit. I told her to expect a stock market crash. The worst part though was not being able to see how long it would last. Kris thought I was nuts and blew it off. Heck, at the time I was questioning my own sanity.

It bothered me so much I couldn’t sleep. I pulled 75% of my IRA out of stocks even though my broker also said I was nuts. I started forming a new business plan based on what would happen. If print marketing and real estate collapsed at the same time, where would real estate marketing go? It had to be the Internet. It was cheap and after all, the data already showed that +90% of their clients were there. Everyone knew real estate was going to the Internet. The bubble bursting spead up the inevitable.

A loose plan was beginning to form. Heunox Corp. would expand its focus and become an expert at Internet real estate marketing. While our copmpetitors would likely cut back, now was the time for Heunox to invest in building a comprehensive real estate Internet marketing engine. We estimated it would take us about a year and it would need some simple changes to what we already did. Wow, did we underestimate.  At the time we had no idea that it would take four years and Heunox would find a comprehensive solution that we believe is the present and future solution to real estate marketing. We even have the numbers to prove it.

If you don’t care about the full story, check out the summary graph of the early ListingNotes websites. Yes, that’s a 9.4x increase in traffic. 100 visitors turned into 935 visitors on average. Lead generation followed a similar curve.

ListingNotes: Overall Site Visitors

Year One: The Dart Approach

We spent the first year looking at what others in our market were doing and building our own tests based on that information. Basically we did the dartboard approach. Throw darts at the problem and then see which ones works.

Search engine optimization (SEO) became my life. It was nothing for me to devote 40+ hours/week on this while still handling my normal workload. Thirteen test sites were build with differing SEO techniques. We tweaked each site every few months as we fine-tuned each technique.

Trulia.com was just becoming main stream so we created an engine that did daily uploads of our client’s listings. Other national websites copied the Trulia model so we started syndicating listing to several national sites. Two listing syndication models emerged. One focused marketing the listings on the national site. Others focused on driving traffic back to the broker site. We started tracking traffic coming from both models.

Social media was becoming more than just blogging. Sites like MySpace and Facebook were getting noticed. If the consumer loved blogging, then business would soon follow.

We studied lead generation techniques. Our main focus was on more traffic, but we needed to convert these to qualified leads.

We did paid advertising using Google AdSense. We studied how much traffic came from paid advertising and if it had any effect of search engine rankings.

Year Two: Picking the Winning Darts

After a year of dart throwing, it became clear there there was no one true winner. It would take a combination of approaches to gain the most benefit from Internet marketing. Visitor traffic  proved to be the best tool for tracking results.

Several SEO techniques showed amazing results. Many required simple changes to what we already offered, but the real winners required a complete rewrite of our website code-base. We added the simple techniques to our existing sites and saw a 2.4x increase in visitors. Wow! Now that we had a taste of success and wanted more. We spent the next 12 months rewriting our core code so we could take advantage of the best SEO techniques.

One website trumped multiple websites every time for SEO. That means listings (IDX) blogging, profiles and community information has all be a part of one website. Add-ons solutions is like giving your clients a reason to leave your website.

Listing Syndication was another  surprise. There was a 3x increase in traffic coming from national sites that syndicated listings back to the broker site.  National sites that just provided a generic link back to the broker say a modest 50% gain in site visitors. During this time ListHub showed up on my radar that provided more websitres to syndicate to than what we offered. One day ListHub contacted me we both discovered that we each had a vital marketing tool that complemented each other. We dropped our own syndication engine in favor of the more robust ListHub tool. When Point2 came on our radar as a second national syndicator, we passed on what they offered because they didn’t provide links back to the broker site which provided the best lead generation results.

Those thirteen test SEO sites added one more surprise. We had partially mimicked the Trulia model by using our clients listings to populate the websites in 13 different communities. That simple technique significantly increased the search engine traffic on every one of our client’s websites. It was time to build community sites for real.

Blogging was proving to be effective, but few of our clients took the time to blog. Those that did were starting to see great results. Facebook was just becoming mainstream. We started encouraging our clients to start using sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Our lead generation research showed that we had the tools necessary already in place. We just needed to repackage them to get the greatest benefit out of them. It was time to tweak our code-base again.

Paid advertising works though it has gotten expensive. We found that paid Google ads does help SEO for the site being advertised even though Google claims it does not give sites with paid ads an advantage.

Now that we knew of several pieces that worked, it was time to put it all together. The website code had three core pieces built-in:

• Every page is search engine optimized
• All formes were optimized for lead generation
• The URLS were optimized for listing and agent syndication

It was finally time to put it all together as one solution. Even at this point we had no concept at how well it would turn out.

Year Three: The Five Early ListingNotes Websites

We took our original SEO test sites and revised them to be Local Listing Syndication sites for 13 different communities. One of the communities we focused on was Grand Haven.

With our core code rewritten from scratch with the latest SEO and lead generation techniques, we were ready to put everything we learned into five broker websites. Each site used our latest code and incorporated ListHub to syndicate their listings. Clients were encouraged to blog and get on social websites and create links back to their website.

We then sat back and tracked the progress of these websites. The first month showed a 3.7x increase in traffic and a 4x increase in leads. Three months showed a 6.8x increase in traffic as the SEO really started to kick in. At this point we knew we had something special.

We decided to name our new system ListingNotes and started talking to anyone who would listen. Looking back, we jumped the gun a little early because all the data wasn’t in. Eventually we won over all of our existing clients and word-of-mouth has brought in several others. Still, the final results were not in.

Year Four: 12 Months of ListingNotes Data

Finally, I took the time last week to gather the first 12 months of data of the original websites. I’m still staring at the results. Let me share.

ListingNotes: Search Engines

We found a 12 time increase in search engine traffic. A site that started with 100 unique visitors in now was enjoying 1,200.

ListingNotes: Syndication

The combined listing syndication techniques showed a 5x increase in visitor traffic. The local syndication through ListingNotes community websites proved to be just as effective as national syndication.

ListingNotes: Social Media

A 25x increase in social media traffic certainly points to it being here to stay.

ListingNotes: All Traffic

When we put all the results together, we saw a 9.4x increase in traffic as compared to our original base websites.

• Social media alone increased traffic by 50% as compared to the base site.
• SEO provided the largest increase in traffic followed by listing syndication.

How the Competition Stacks Up

It was now time to relook at our competitor offerings and see where they would stand.

We noticed most all of our competitors uses a third party for their IDX listings which are linked using a diffrent website. That completely negates the main benefit of listing syndication since it can’t link listings back to the broker website. Wow. That means the 5x benefit of listing syndication doesn’t work with other sites. They only experience the 0.5x increase in traffic by providing generic links back to their site.

Few offer blogging built into the site like ListingNotes does. External blogs split the SEO rankings making both sites fall farther down the search results.

Since nobody seems to offer the one website approach, it looks like the best any competitor can offer is a traffic increase of about 3x. I’d stack a 9.4x potential increase over 3x increase any day.

What about Point2? Good question. When we researched Point2 listing syndication as compared to ListHub, at first glance we thought Point2 had the advantage. Then we realized that they only do national marketing syndication and does nothing to drive traffic directly to your site. That is probably because their IDX solution is provided by a third party making it impossible.

While we believe all real estate website providers has something to offer we don’t believe there is anything on the market that even approaches the results proven when using ListingNotes.

If you see me babbling about ListingNotes at some meeting, now you know I’m not doing sales speak. It’s a product I completely believe can lead Michigan out of this economic mess by getting REALTORS® up to speed on Internet Marketing without having to become an Internet Geek. Let Heunox be your Internet geek mentor while you continue doing what you do best. That being selling real estate while mentoring your buyers and sellers through the process.

I’m finally getting around to writing about my experiences as a web designer within the real estate industry. I’m doing so with some hesitation because I burned out doing something similar for a different industry in the years before I entered the real estate market.

I used to write a monthly column for a national paint and coatings magazine from the perspective of a guy in management. I was the guy who wrote the “homey” articles about my dandy experiences in the industry. I  would spent a month struggling over an article of specific length that would fill a magazine page. Eventually, I would turn it in knowing full well it wasn’t polished. It was more like rambling thoughts.

A few days later, Karen, my editor would return it to me and I would gasp. Is that me? Wow! How did she manage to make me sound so good? Karen had taken my “homey” text (as she called it) and turned my prose into something professional while still maintaining “homey” person that I was in the writing. I’ll never forget Karen. She was and still is the best in my mind.

This blog post is my first real attempt at serious writing in many years. I dedicate this first blog to you Karen. Without your guidance and encouragement, I probably never would of had the strength to start and succeed with my own business. You will always rock in my book!

In the coming posts, I hope to inform and entertain you. We’ll cry and laugh together. We’ve lived through the industries good and bad days. The nice thing about blogging is that its not one-way conversation. You can join with me in the chorus and sing along with the blues, rhapsodies, comodies and maybe even a love song here and there.

Look out. I’m back! – Jim

I managed to find Karen through Google and emailed her as I was finishing up this article. Google is amazing at finding just about anything. Karen is now published! Way to go Karen! I immediately purchased and downloaded her book for reading on my iPad.