The Backstory
Gia & Grant Freer, real estate brokers in Florida sought out to create a site that they believed would become the premiere
one-stop shop for home buyers, sellers and agents alike. Their RealSeekr.com project has been intriguing to me because it’s founded by agents instead of a media company!
After sitting back and reading blogs for a year and a half (I promise, the Freers probably know who you are already), they created a site that they felt would answer to some of the problems incurred by other search sites. RealSeekr.com was born to centralize listings information and fill in the biggest gap in national search sites which is the socializing aspect that gives real estate professionals the advantage of real time social opportunities. So far, they’ve partnered with individual brokerages who provide their local board’s IDX feed in over 20 states with already more than 1.6 million listings.
How Do I Get Started?
RealSeekr.com offers free memberships that allow users to join and interact immediately or a premium membership for $249 (per year) allowing agents to have “unlimited enhancements,” classified ads and free SMS Text Messaging (all of which we’ll get to in a sec). Home buyers can sign up and create a profile for free and can immediately begin chatting with agents.
What’s This “Real Time” Stuff?
By real time, I mean that on your profile, users can see your last 10 Twitter messages (if you choose to allow it), can contact you on Skype, or send you a SMS Text Message to your cell. What’s extremely interesting to me is that with each individual listing, users can push the “share this” button to use social bookmarking, sending the listing to all sorts of sites (Facebook, digg, del.ic.ious, etc) or create a link to be posted anywhere (Twitter, WordPress, Blogger) or simply emailed the old fashioned way.
What DO I Like?
- First and foremost, I like that as they are growing, they are very quick to respond to feedback and work out any bugs that users find. In fact, they welcome all user input.
- Because listings are fed from the local MLS, you don’t have to start from scratch to showcase your listing, just go claim your existing listings and enhance them. Nice.
- RealSeekr.com has a Q&A community that doesn’t have a points system, doesn’t feature who answers the most frequently or who has the most awesomest answers ever. I think this Q&A environment has the best chance of survival as far as real estate forums go because it rewards agents by connecting them with consumers. Period.
- I enjoy that members can upload unlimited photos, video and audio to their listings and the listings have Google Street View already incorporated.
- I absolutely LOVE that the enhanced listings show up first but are not separated, making it less invasive for home seekers who are programmed to skip over the separated listings as junk ads (think of a google search, you ignore the sponsored ads and check out your search results first).
- There are a LOT of customization options: you can select your (3) professional specialties, the languages you speak, upload a photo of you AND your brokerage logo and whether you’re an agent, broker, home buyer or “real estate professional” (which is a category I tell myself they created for me, the non-licensed person involved in helping run a brokerage).
- Each enhanced listing offers an option to enter a TON of keywords which helps Googlers find your listing.
- Premium accounts come with five geocoded ads (meaning someone searching in Austin will see the featured Austin agent). I’m hoping they’ll branch out and put these geocoded ads on affiliate sites to increase exposure.
What Do I Have MIXED FEELINGS About?
- I’m on the fence about the sponsored agent links that come with the premium account because although they show up on many of the pages, they don’t seem to be geocoded, so Benn’s link sits next to a Realtor in Bristol, CT. That’s great for people who are shopping for “a home, somewhere in the US” but not so cool for the local consumer. This may be because of the site’s in beta and no one is on it yet, but if it is not geocoded I hope they’ll reconfigure that.
What DON’T I Like?
- My biggest beef is the photo uploading process- this one at a time thing isn’t going to cut it… I have 70 shots I want to upload and I have the patience of a toddler, so I beg RealSeekr.com to upgrade the photo uploading system.
- I’m not sure if it’s because it’s slow to update, but even after uploading a picture to a claimed listing, it still says “no image available.”
- When enhancing your listing, what typically would be a “save” button at the bottom of the page says “enhance property” which confused me since I’m programmed to find the “save” button. It’s just a personal preference, but I would rename it to “save enhancements” for those of us who are formerly blonde.
- The site currently allows home sellers that are doing their own FSBO (for sale by owner) listing to upload for free. I’m not sure how this is going to work overall.
- Lease listings are not on the site but I haven’t asked if they are a part of RealSeekr.com’s next phase. I’d love to have our lease properties up there and that segment of the home seeking community is left out. In this mortgage environment, some choose to lease instead of buy, so if it’s not a part of the master plan, RealSeekr may miss a big opportunity there.
In Summary…
RealSeekr.com, founded by agents who are stepping out on a limb with their project looks to be a very promising site that centralizes so many of the traditional as well as newly formed social networking tools in one place to excite buyers as they connect with tech savvy agents. RealSeekr.com feeds the desperate desire for instant gratification that consumers AND agents have. With much of the country covered so far, they have an awesome platform to grow from and their enhanced listings and geocoded ads are a feature I’m personally enthusiastic about, as I am about their no-points Q&A section. There are some tweaks RealSeekr will be making over the coming months and they welcome ALL input! We highly anticipate watching the newly hatched RealSeekr.com blossom. Keep up the great work, Gia & Grant!
