For the past year or so everyone has been telling us that we should stop renting an apartment and buy a house, especially since the economy is so horrible in Michigan and the prices have reached an all time low.

We started to venture out towards different real estate websites to see which ones provided the most information. We spoke to some of our friends who had recently purchased homes to see how they felt about the process and tried to learn from their mistakes. The majority of our friends referred us to these two websites: Realtor.com and RealestateOne.com. We had also heard about RealtyTrac.com and decided to invest in a membership with them.

Needless to say no one website was perfect and we ran into issues with all three of them. Realtor.com is supposedly the website that is nationally recognized and it was actually the best one, the problem with it is that it does not always provide the search results that match your search criteria. For example we started searching in the 48322 zip code because of the award winning school district. The following is an example of our search:

We received about 100 matches, but over 70% of them were in a different school district! A tip for realtor.com: Add school district to your search criteria. You already have the most search criteria than any other realestate website out there, perfect your site by adding this additional crucial search criteria.

Realtytrac.com was the worst site out there! I can’t believe we paid for it!!! They supposedly provide you with the most information such as how much the home was previously purchased for; if it is foreclosed how much is owed to the bank, and a ton of information that will help you in making the best offer when you decide to purchase a home.

However almost every house we were interested in proved to be inaccurately listed and most of them were homes that did not even have any MLS numbers and were not even on the market yet. I guess we should have known a 2500 square foot home listed in West Bloomfield for $100,000 is way too good to be true. But look at how well they convince visitors to sign up:

I imagine that RealtyTrac’s conversion rate is pretty high though because they do an excellent job of enticing visitors to subscribe by not providing a ton of information and offering a free 7 day trial. It took us about a month to realize that the site was a waste of time and we had already invested in a 3 week membership, which is equivalent to $40!

Imagine the buying power that would be given to you if there was actually a company giving the accurate information RealtyTrac claims to provide.

Finally, Realestateone.com had all the homes that were up for sale in Michigan and had great features such as searching by multiple cities and specifying which homes were foreclosures. It also had a search criteria option of searching by school district which was very appealing to us:

This was a great site overall, but as you can see was mainly targeted towards Michigan home buyers. So for our purposes realestateone.com was the site for us. Our second favorite was Realtor.com and of course Realtytrac.com was at the bottom of our list. What sites have you used when searching for your home? We’re definitely open to suggestions

Tags: realtor.com RealtyTrac.com RealestateOne.com
Posted in Business, Conversion Optimization, Sales & Marketing