Is Your Web Strategy Y2K Ready?

Businesses nationwide are bracing for what Y2K may bring. Billions of dollars are being spent ensuring that business continues as usual when the confetti lands and the champagne has popped. For many, however, bracing for Y2K doesn’t just mean business as usual. It means changing the way business is done.

The real estate industry presents the perfect example. Real estate offices everywhere are updating their software and checking their systems to ensure everything will run smoothly through the new year. What many are failing to do, however, is bring their own business practices up to speed. Their computers may be Y2K ready, but their business practices aren’t. If real estate professionals don’t upgrade their way of doing business, and quickly, they run the risk of dis-intermediating themselves.

Nowhere is this more apparent than the all-too-common practice of trying to control home listing information. There was once a time when Realtors served as the gatekeeper of all home listings, and their value to buyers and sellers was due in large part to their control of this data. In an effort to continue that control, some Realtors and multiple listing services today still sign exclusive marketing deals, thus failing to effectively market their customers’ listings.

Today, however, the Internet has changed the rules that once governed the real estate industry. Consumers can access listing information for themselves, and often will spend hours learning about the real estate transaction on their own before engaging a real estate agent. But they still do and will continue to use an agent. Several studies and thousands of agents have already proven this. The challenge for today’s Realtor is to embrace this new role and enhance the experience and service they offer their customers.

HomeStore.com has made every effort to sign both brokers and multiple listing services to exclusive, "Gold Alliance" contracts. Unfortunately, these deals help the industry continue to practice old methods of controlling listings, as if the rules have not changed. In the short run it hurts the consumer, the agent and broker. Arguments are made left and right for the validity of these deals, but he truth remains the same – if you’re not where your customers are, those customers will quickly find your competition.

In the long run, these deals only hurt the industry.

How do you make yourself Y2K ready? Think about how you do business. Think about how consumers today are looking at your business. Then change. Evolve. Realize that your goal is not to control home listing information, but to become the Realtor that today’s homebuyer is looking for.