Written by Fernando Maciá
Índice
Over the last two years, we have witnessed a rapid evolution in the adoption of basic usability and indexability principles by the main Spanish real estate portals. Aspiring to become a real vertical search alternative focused on the real estate market as opposed to general search engines -such as Google, Yahoo!, Live or Ask- portals such as Idealista, Fotocasa, Globaliza, Expocasa, Portae or Urbaniza, among others, are competing for the favor of thousands of users who daily undertake the increasingly difficult task of finding a decent home at a reasonable price.
Despite the obvious improvements, the real estate supply sector on the Web still has some unresolved issues. The fact that Internet use in Spain is still behind that of the most advanced countries in our environment does not justify the fact that Spain is not at the forefront of this sector. Especially taking into account the very high level of homes built annually in our country and the significant percentage of them that are purchased by foreign buyers.
The growing use of real estate portals in Spain is a phenomenon corroborated by an international trend. In a recent interview, Marque Joosten, CEO of funda.nlthe leading Dutch real estate portal (which triples the number of unique monthly visitors to the Spanish leader) commented that the listings of properties for sale on the Web have come to mean the gradual disappearance of real estate classified ads in the daily press. The speed of consultation of the supply of apartments for sale online and the possibility of directly comparing features and prices on different portals, even for the same product, have diverted the attention of potential buyers to the Internet, despite the fact that a significant part of advertising is still directed towards offline media.
If we were to look at the North American market to establish a prospective framework of what could be the evolution of the scenario in the short term, the figures 77-24-69 can be of interest. This is not a new beauty canon or a phone number, but the three most cited numbers in studies on the real estate market and future trends throughout this year in the United States. In fact, a survey conducted by the National Association of Realtors showed that 77% of people looking for a home in 2006 used the Internet as their first source of information. Second, 24% of homebuyers stated that they had found the home they currently owned on the Internet. Finally, 69% of Internet users had only consulted with a single real estate agent in their process of buying a new home.
In Spain, the percentage of people interested in looking for a house who use the Internet as their first alternative is already 48%. This current and future scenario should encourage real estate companies to invest more decisively in what is on its way to becoming the leading marketplace in the world.The key point of contact between supply and demand in the short term. If your office whose address ends in .com is not the one that receives the highest number of daily contacts, it will be very soon. So you need to dedicate the people, resources and means necessary to properly manage these contacts and ensure that a progressively higher percentage of them end up becoming customers. Let’s see, then, what are the main shortcomings that, to a greater or lesser extent, affect most real estate portals in our country and what measures should be taken to achieve greater harmony with what users are going to demand -or are already demanding- in the future.
Multi-language real estate portals
As we have already mentioned, foreigners from the United Kingdom, Germany, France and Italy accounted for almost 36% of the new residence market in 2005. On the other hand, Spain is a multilingual country in which Spanish coexists with other regional languages which, in some cases, are spoken daily by millions of people. And despite both of these facts, most of the most heavily trafficked real estate portals are only presented in Spanish.
It is true that the use of different languages adds an extra difficulty in content management. Marketers themselves are often in charge of generating the content of their own ads. Although many of the descriptive data of a property (meters, price, orientation, location, number of rooms, as well as whether or not it has certain equipment such as air conditioning, heating, thermal insulation, etc.) can be standardized so as to reduce to a minimum the need for translation by means of icons, check boxes, etc., it is true that the argumentation of a property may be based on the following criteria The only way to achieve this is by using a professional translation of the property or the description of details peculiar to it.
The maintenance of multiple versions of a portal in different languages, be they the languages of the autonomous regions or foreign languages, entails an added complexity that obviously has an impact on the operating costs of the same. It would be necessary to study whether the users of these portals -professionals and individuals- would be willing to pay this extra cost in exchange for the obvious advantages.
Advantages such as, first of all, demonstrating a much higher level of interest in the recipient of the offer: enough to have taken the trouble to express oneself in the buyer’s own language. Secondly, the possibility of reaching a much wider market than if we reduce the portal to a single language. We have already seen that an important part of the real estate demand in Spain lives outside our borders. Thirdly, competing in localized versions of search engines, so that we will face a much smaller number of searches matching our offered properties. You only have to search for “apartment in Benidorm” on google.es and its Norwegian equivalent on google.no to realize that the competition is less when we present ourselves in languages other than Spanish or English.
2.- Personalization
Direct marketing has been proving for years to be more effective than mass advertising due to its ability to personalize its messages, adapting them to specific user profiles. On the Internet, we have multiple technical capabilities to adapt to our users, even before they have visited the first page. Let’s see how:
- Location: when any user starts an Internet browsing session, the system assigns him/her a number called IP address. This number is unique for that user throughout the network. When the user requests a page from a server from his Internet browser, the server actually understands that it has to send that page to this or that IP number. So the server knows the IP number that requested the page before sending it. One of the most interesting things the IP number tells us is the location of the person requesting the page. Even allowing for some margin of error, the IP number will tell us the country and, in many cases, the region, province or state and the city (sometimes even the district of the city). Taking into account the information provided by the IP, it is clear that we can customize some of the contents of the home page to better adapt to the user’s expectations. Thus, we could present to visitors from Germany the outstanding offers in Mallorca or the Costa Blanca instead of the latest promotion of Leganés.
- Language: another thing we know about the user requesting a page from the server is the language he speaks or, at least, the language that his Web access device “speaks”: the language of his browser and the language of his operating system. In the same way, we can use this information to present by default the corresponding version of our website, although leaving the user the possibility to define later the language in which he/she wants to continue browsing. In this way, we avoid useless welcome pages monopolized by the language selection (which represent a useless waste of the showcase surface that is the home page) and we shorten in one click (the language selection) the visitor’s path to becoming a customer.
- Business card: once a user has visited us, he will have left us very useful information that we can store in a business card: a cookie on his own computer. Here we can note which areas and types of homes you were interested in, the language in which you navigated, etc. so that we can present you with the most relevant content the next time you visit us. Again, customization and personalization.
3.- Keep nothing to yourself
Real estate portals follow one of two trends:
- Those who keep most of the information (price, exact location, etc.) to themselves: they are of the opinion that information is part of the advantage that the seller must maintain over the customer in order to be in a position to win in the negotiation process. If the customer has all the information – he suspects – it is very likely that he will try to “jump” the middleman and close a deal on his own.
- Those who offer all the informationThe principle is that the more information the end customer has, the more documented the issues he raises in the negotiation will be and the easier it will be to avoid wasting time giving the same information over and over again to all kinds of contacts indiscriminately. This allows you to focus on those prospects who are actually close to making a purchase decision.
The first option is, in fact, no longer an option. Any user moderately skilled in the use of search engines will be able to find the information they are looking for even if the portal does not provide it: from valuations and sales prices of similar properties in the same area to information on facilities and equipment, crime rates, schools, hospitals, etc. in any geographical area. Portals focused on keeping such information hidden, as well as professionals who prefer them to those who favor the transparency option, believing that by doing so they maintain their value as expert advisors, are in error. The user will soon recognize as “experts” those portals and professionals who give him all the information and allow him to really focus his queries on the key aspects of the operation. This saves time and resources for both the user and the professional.
4.- Integrate information from the environment
The area covered by what we understand to be the surroundings of a home is greater the further away the prospective buyer is. That is to say, a future buyer of a property in Alicante who currently lives in the same city may be interested in changing neighborhood to be closer to his job, to the school he wants for his children, etc. For this person, what he needs to know about the surroundings of his future home is an area assimilable to the neighborhood. He will look for a house in such and such a street or in the other one three hundred meters further on. For a Basque pensioner couple looking for winter housing in Alicante, the environment they are interested in is much larger: it is very likely that they will compare similar properties in Alicante, Campello, Playa de San Juan… For a British holiday home buyer, it is very likely that the search will focus on large areas such as Costa Blanca, Costa de la Luz, Costa del Sol… Again, the environment grows in size, becoming more diffuse the more distance and the less knowledge one has of it.
This is why, in order to present the same real estate offer in different markets, it is not enough to simply translate the portal into several languages. The purchasing motivations of each market segment are different. Your information needs, too. The real role of the winning real estate portals of the future will be to become information integrators. It is not that the portals themselves, nor the users who use them to advertise their offers, should become content generators. Today, the necessary content providers and tools exist on the Internet that make it possible to easily integrate information into a presentation system that makes that information useful and truly meaningful to users. We are referring to tools such as Google Maps, mortgage comparators, etc.
The managers of these portals should question, among others, the following issues:
- What kind of information do we want to offer and display to our users?
- Do we have the resources to generate it or is it cheaper to outsource it?
- Where can we get the information we are missing? Are there free suppliers or do we have to buy it?
- What are the risks of integrating such information?
Whatever the answer to these questions, it is clear that users come to the Internet primarily in search of information. The portal that is able to offer the highest level of information in a way that is integrated and makes sense to the user will be the one that “takes the cake”.
5.- Competing in search engines
Over the last two years, the leading real estate portals in Spain have made a great effort to adapt their content to the indexing needs of search engines. Basic aspects have been corrected, such as the presentation of the housing files in a new window (pop-up), so frequent until a few months ago, which meant a real wall for these contents to be crawled and indexed by Google and other search engines. But many still present some notable shortcomings, such as:
Unfriendly URLs
: page addresses of excessive length, containing parameters identifying the user’s session or an excessive number of dynamic variables are poorly estimated by search engines. Instead, try to form keyword-rich URLs.
Link text
The words we use in the links are very much taken into account by the search engines: better to use “Apartment in Torrevieja – more info” for a link than simply “Enlarge” or “More info”.
Printable version
is a fantastic idea from a usability point of view, but it can lead to problems. Whether they are added pages or created “on the fly”, they should include the “NOINDEX” meta tag so that search engines do not index it.
Alt text in images
A growing number of visits come from Google Images and other image search engines. these are indexed according to the image file name itself (better apartamento_torrevieja_567.jpg than just 567.jpg), the alt tag text (where we would also include “Apartamento en Torrevieja – Salón) and the text near the image.
This is just a sample of aspects that can be improved to compete in search engines. As long as there is no clear leader in this market category, many users will continue to turn to general search engines to find their future home.
Conclusion
The Internet is a global marketplace, but communication is always between people. It is therefore essential to first draw the demand profile and then adapt our service to it. In an environment where demand comes from multiple countries, from people located in different places, with different motivations for buying real estate in Spain and speaking different languages, real estate portals must be able to adapt to each of these demand profiles. How? Speaking their languages, adapting your information according to what each user will need; personalizing your offer according to aspects that we know in advance: geographic location, language, history of previous visits, etc. And not forgetting that users come to the Internet in search of information. Keeping an ace in the hole can be costly in the long run. Users will access the information they are looking for anyway, perhaps on your main competitor’s portal.
