Enterprise brokerage firms need to be excellent at data aggregation and normalization of IDX and VOW data feeds.
One of the most important industry initiatives over the past decade has been the development of real estate standards for IDX and VOW by the Real Estate Standards Organization.
Speed To Download Real Estate Listings Win Every time
Speed is vitally important in data management. The impact of speed is twofold. First, when data comes from the MLS, the first company to publish the new information indexed by search engines makes a difference to search optimization.
But the second and bigger implication has to do with listing alerts. It's common knowledge that many consumers search on a variety of websites, and they save their property search criteria if they are engaged in buying a home. Every time there is a new listing that matches the consumer’s property search criteria or there is a price change on a listing contained in their search criteria or saved favorites, they get an email alert.
The consumer will get alerts from all of the sites where they registered, but are likely only to read the first email, and only visit the link from the first email. The email alert generates one click, and the redundant and delayed alerts get ignored or deleted.
Speed is also vital in powering the marketing tool for agents. When an agent adds or edits a listing in the MLS, they expect that add/edit to immediately be reflected in the marketing center and on the broker/agent/team website. When there’s a lag, there's frustration and worse yet, a belief that the broker’s website and marketing solutions are not up to par with portals and competition.
Speed also impacts the effectiveness of listing updates. Using the example of a price change or photo change - the virtual tour, postcards, flyers, social media posts, and/or any other marketing the agent is activating needs to have the updates immediately or within minutes. All automation of the development and publishing of updated content is driven by speed. If the speed is not good, agents get lost in the workflow process, leading to lower adoption rates of the brokerage’s marketing tools. Enough disappointment in broker tools will eventually encourage the agent to abandon broker tools and move to their own tools instead, cutting away at the value proposition of the brokerage.
Nobody beats us on data aggregation - our current average is 38 seconds to live on site with photo. New listing email alert is always less than 2 minutes. We send the agent email that congratulates them on the new listing - with a link on the website - click here to share to socials, click here to marketing, click here to seller report, etc.
If you really want to take advantage of our speed, there is a little known trick. As soon as you complete the process of adding or editing a listing in the MLS, go to your website and hit the refresh button until the listing appears. As soon as it does, manually click the buttons to share it on your social media pages. It will promote the ranking in search. Never, ever, ever use a solution that automatically publishes your listings to social media. Those posts are suppressed in the display algorithm, so the automation hurts you rather than helps you. In fact, people may never see them at all in their feed.
Taking Advantage of Data Aggregation and Normalization Strategy
But wait! There’s more!. Depending on the market, the difference between IDX and VOW data might be create an opportunity for enhanced lead generation. Large firms like Howard Hanna have taken advantage of their market dominance by removing their listings from IDX. This means that no other firm can display their listings to the public. It’s like Southwest telling the airline ticket reseller industry to go pound salt. If you want to see a Southwest fare price, go to Southwest.com. Same is true at Howard Hanna. If a consumer wants to look at their listing - they need to go to HowardHanna.com. If a brokerage has market share (we recommend 20% and a strong consumer brand), you can deploy the Southwest strategy to drive more traffic to your website. Howard Hanna has experienced an explosive growth with this strategy.
In a market like Cleveland where Howard Hanna has deployed the Southwest strategy, other firms in the market have a work around. With a Virtual Office Website, consumers who register to your website will be able to view Howard Hanna listings. Here’s how.
When consumers search on your website, you can place a banner on the search result list that says “260 listings match your search result, 210 are displayed below. Register to see the 50 listings not displayed.” Guess what, every consumer will register. You will see explosive growth with this strategy.
IDX vs. VOW
IDX is internet data exchange program that allows brokers and their authorized agents to display public listings online to consumers. VOW is virtual office website, which is a data set that allows brokerages to display additional data to consumers after they register as a customer on their website. Accessing VOW data requires the web visitor to register and declare that they are working with an agent. This basically opens up information to the registered customer that an agent can see in the MLS.
One caveat is there is not a standard set of fields for VOW data across all MLS areas. This is because local MLSs are free to make decisions of what fields to include in the VOW data set. For instance, one MLS may include sold data in their VOW feed, whereas another MLS may include sold data in IDX feeds.
Days on Market
Another advantage to Virtual Office Websites is the ability to display Days on Market. We know that consumers want this datapoint, but broker websites are not permitted to display it unless it is with a registered consumer. To generate more leads, we publish the field name “Days on Market” but the field is locked. Consumers register to unlock the field.
Creativity is the path to success, and your website vendor needs to be creative to find and deliver strategies and solutions that will help you gain an advantage over your competitors to drive more leads and more transactions.