Knowing Your Real Estate Numbers

Knowing your numbers in Real Estate is absolutley essential, most people focus their attention on the obvious and important ones like List Price, Days on Market, Price Per Square Foot, etc…However, when you are marketing a home for sale the most important numbers are really quiet different. Numbers like ”how many people have seen my house and know it’s for sale?” are essential but hard to find. 

Magazines and Newspapers can give you good distribution and circulation numbers, the problem is that you just don’t know how many of those readers actually see your ad and more importantly where they go or what they do next, unless the reader calls. Yard Signs, like ads provide little feedback other than a call to let us know what kind on interest there is in the home. Brochure boxes help as they allow us to keep a count of how many fliers have been taken but since they are so easy to take, it’s difficult to know how many were serious, curious or just mischevious.

On the other hand, we have used our website SpringsHomes.com to get a handle on our online marketing numbers. The Internet actually allows us to track how effecitvley we are marketing a particular property. We use a technique called a single property page. This is a website and domain dedicated to a single property, the agent purchases a domain name related to to the actual property they are listing. For example if the property address were 14280 Corrico Court, the URL would be closley related to the property address, here’s an example of one of our single property sites: http://www.corricocourt.com/ this is a memorable address and easy enough for an agent or home seller to pass along to a prospective buyer.

By setting up a single property website we are able to monitor how many people actually look at the listing on line, how long they stay and what they look at most. We use Google Analytics, a web analytics program, in conjunction with the single property site to monitor the most important metrics. This is relativley simple to setup and at the end of the month we are able to print a copy of the report and send it to our seller. Google Analytics allows us to track the following:

• Number Of Visitors

• Where they came from (Google, Yahoo, Direct, Link, etc…)

• Where they are (Country, City, State, etc…)

• How Long They Stayed

• What they looked at while they were there

And probably more importantly…

• Where they left the site

• Where they went next

The last two might seem negative but these go a long way at helping us understand where and why they left. This gives us a great opportunity to fine tune our pages, keeping viewers engaged in our listings. At the end of the day that is the Real Estate marketers job, to keep your listings in front of the home buying public!

To view a sample Google Analytics Report, Click Here.

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