"Hey babe, looking for a dream home?"
"Hey good looking, wanna check out my testimonials?"
"Hey toots, wanna search my database?"
Like catcalls from construction workers to pedestrians, false bravado, come-ons and innuendo continue to adorn broker websites. They stand as a gripping example of how out of touch brokers are with the times.
It’s getting old.
It makes no sense anymore.
And it’s not what real estate is really about.
Why is that consumers can learn more about your agents and how they think sourcing them on Trulia Voices than combing through the About Our Agents section of your websites? Why is the conversation still so one-sided, replete with greetings from seasons gone by, navigation vases filled with rank, stale content and littered with sales pitch cant?
Honestly, it’s blowing my mind.
Brokers, your web presence could be your lifeblood. More than you know. But the way you’ve gone about it, they’ve become your biblical Nile. Lifeless. A bloody body of vanishing traffic, relevance and importance.
I know the rap. Websites are expensive. You need to re-do them every two years. Yawn.
Chase Nation – one company, having endured the recent plagues of real estate, is making its exodus from 1.0 captivity and heading out to find a new promised land. Built courtesy of Ning.
There’s no guarantee that consumers or their agents will sign up and join. Time will tell. But what makes this important is the departure this broker has taken from the bondage of traditional thinking. It’s what a leader does. It’s the fire at night that hovers high leading the way.
I was invited to this network last week.
I signed in.
And I began to converse with an agent.
And it was good.
- Davison
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Having previously lived in Lake Tahoe, I'm very familiar with Chase Realty (my Mom sold her home through Sue Lowe, who I notice is one of their bloggers!). Chase has long been known as a fine brokerage and it is great to see such a progressive, informative, and client friendly approach to a brokerage site. Certainly beats the blog that a local (to me) competing brokerage debuted 2 weeks ago – took them 7 days to publish a new post after they announced their blog in the local paper (http://blog.homgroup.com/). Thanks for bringing the Chase Nation site to my attention – seems like a good one to watch.
Wow. Great post and great site. It's amazing that it's taken this long for real estate sites to catch on this the fact that "value" to the end user isn't just a 5 letter word. I live in Chicago but now feel, after spending 30 minutes on the site, that I know the area, the market, and would trust the agents on that site because they were actually 3 dimensional. I try to push "differentiation" with my agents every day in their client interaction and to see a company lead by example is refreshing.