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How Popular are Real Estate Websites
(and How to Verify Agent Claims)

Almost every agent has a website or they use their Broker's website. It's easy to get a website, getting Buyers
to visit it is the challenge. The great thing about the Internet is that you know how many people visited a
site or even a particular page on a site. This is much different than traditional advertising like real estate
magazines. All you know is how many magazines were printed. You don't know how many were actually
distributed, how many were read, and how many Buyers read your particular ad.

On every website, a website log is kept. Every connection to a website is logged. I run a weblog analysis
program which tells me all sorts of data such as how many people visited, what pages were visited, how
many people found my site via search engines and even what search phrase they used.

First, let me say that if someone uses the term "Hits" when they are talking about the popularity of a website,
they are either not that knowledgeable about websites or they are trying to mislead you. Hits are a
meaningless measurement of a website since a hit is when a graphic is loaded. A particular webpage may
have a few graphics (or hits) while other pages may have more than 100. My websites received millions of
"Hits" last year but you'll never see me use this figure. The real measurement is unique visitors. With this figure,
it doesn't count how many people come back to the site (which is also a good statistic for the website owner
to know).

What you get when you use my Marketing service is exposure on the Top 2 real estate websites on the
Central Coast; www.SloCountyHomes.com and www.LocalLinks.com

That's my claim and here is how I back it up.

Over 250,000 unique visitors came to my sites in 2006. Since no other Central Coast real estate website owner
has released their unique visitor statistics for 2006, I can't compare the numbers so here is how I came to the
conclusion that my sites were the Top 2 in the area.

Most Realtors use what are called "template web sites". These are websites offered by companies that start
with a template and allows Realtors to customize it by adding in their specific information. You've probably have
noticed websites that look similar or have the same content. These are template websites.

Point2Agent.com is one of the most popular template website vendors. They currently have over 110,000 agent
subscribers. What Point2Agent does is report statistics on their member websites every week.

Below are the statistics for the week of January 21st. Notice that the Average member website received
93 unique visitors for the week.

If someone claims a lot of visitors to a site, you should ask how visitors found the site. What most Buyers do when
they search for real estate is to use a Search Engine, Google specifically. The most popular real estate
search phrases are "(city name) real estate".

Below is a chart that shows if one of my websites show up in the Top 10 of the search engines for a particular
real estate search phrase. As you'll notice, I focus on ranking well in Google and Yahoo (especially Google).
MSN is a distant third in the search engine industry. The below claims are easily verified, just enter these search
phrases in Google or Yahoo and look for either SloCountyHomes.com or LocalLinks.com in the results.

Keith websites appearing in the Top 10  - as of 2/17/07

No other agent website comes close to the search engine rankings Keith sites have.  In fact, Keith has almost as many positions in the Top 10 as all other Central Coast agent websites combined!  Being in the Top 10 for different cities is also important as a Buyer may initially search using a city name but end up buying a home in a completely different city.

What to ask when someone makes website claims?

• The first thing is to clarify the claim. Are they quoting unique visitors?

• If it's a national site like Century21.com, ask how many people searched for Central Coast properties. Quoting a total number for a nationwide site doesn't really say that *anyone* searches for SLO homes.  Go to the search engines and do the real estate search phrase lookup. If the national site doesn't show up, how are people finding it? 

• Ask to see the statistics. If they can't supply them, don't believe the claim.

Here is what the statistics will look like. These are the summary statistics for January 2007 for both SloCountyHomes.com and LocalLinks.com. (Total Unique IPs is the same as Unique Visitors).

	Report for slocountyhomes.com - Jan 07: General Statistics

Summary

	Report for locallinks jan 07: General Statistics

Summary

The following are the statistics for a property website for a 30 day period.

Property Website

http://www.7725sundance.com Web log statistics - (January 16th - February 15th)

Summary

I thought I'd also add the following table from the weblog analysis report. This shows how many visitors found one of my sites using a particular search engine. This is for January 2007.