Brokers Find Gem of Seller Lead Generation and Conversion

For many years, WAV Group has studied the effectiveness of broker websites. This research has included understanding where broker website traffic comes from, the effectiveness of listing syndication, the strategies of search engine optimization and marketing, lead conversion by lead source, and broker website rankings in their competitive market.

Through this research and discovery process, we impart many best practices that brokers and their vendors can use to develop strategies and roadmaps for ongoing success. For the most part, the strategies have been around active listings for most brokers, but a few firms have long known that off market data can develop a trove of opportunity for firms.

We began to notice the impact of off market data by studying online share of voice using comScore, Hitwise, and Nielsen. There are pretty significant differences between these companies in terms of methodology. For the most part, only Hitwise was able to detect regional broker websites. Nielsen and comScore do a very good job of covering the national audience, but they miss local websites that do not have enough traffic to be scored nationally. One thing that we recognized is that ZipRealty, Redfin, and sometimes Movoto performed very well against the national portals and with few exceptions; they were the top broker websites in the top demographic market areas (largest cities) of America.

What do portals and brokerages like ZipRealty and Redfin do differently that allows them to be online marketing champions?

Traffic to broker websites comes from a few discrete sources like typing in the URL, organic search results, paid search results, social media, listing syndication, etc. Generally, the more data you have on your website, the more landing pages you have for consumers to find information, and the more traffic you get.