PPC, Pay Per Click advertising, primarily with Google Adwords, has delivered a great many prospects to my websites in the past. And, though pegging the dollar amount is impossible, it’s been a nice commission revenue stream from working those leads.

There’s another approach to paying for clicks, and I’ve been involved in a three week experiment with Facebook ads for real estate. I’ll be reporting in the future on results, hopefully good ones, but I’ve been getting some good site visitors from Facebook. The biggest difference is the ability to target the prospects who’ll see my ads really closely with Facebook. Here’s a step-by-step tutorial on easy Facebook ads for real estate. It will speak to this tight targeting to save money and reach the best prospects.

December 15, 2009
By: Jay Thompson
Author’s Website: http://www.phoenixrealestateguy.com

If I were Craig Newmark — the “Craig” in that little site known as CraigsList — I’d be looking over my shoulder with my eye on Seattle.

There lies the corporate home of Zillow, where they just rolled out the latest addition to the second most visited real estate web site on the planet (after PhoenixRealEstateGuy.com Realtor.com).

Zillow has entered the rentalz market. (Sorry, “rentalz” makes better use of the “Z” than zentals.)

Yessir, now in addition to seeing homes for sale, recent sales, and the goofy Make Me Move “listings” you’ll soon see little purple house icons reflecting homes available for rent.

Compare that slick, polished and useful search interface to a sample from the aforementioned CraigsList and you’ll see why I think Craig should be a little concerned.

CraigsList is cool in a Web 0.5, 1980’s kind of way. But have you ever tried to really find anything there? As Jim Duncan  points out, CL gets a ton of traffic, but the user interface is beyond annoying.

So other than a spiffy (and usable) search, what is Zillow bringing to the table with this entry into the rental dance?

• A landlord, property manager or rental listing agent can get their rental listed on Zillow for $9.95 for 180 days (if you are a landlord and you need more than six months to lease a home, you might want to consider another investing strategy. I recommend savings bonds).

• Rental listings will be “featured” — displayed at the top of the page. Zillow officials claim featured listings get six times the exposure of non-featured listings. A thought just came across my mind though (it happens). If all rental listings are featured, then what difference does it make? Best I can tell, there is no way to have an non-featured rental listing. Unless home search and rental search results are co-mingled…

• Speaking of co-mingling, Zillow mentioned on a call yesterday that something like 25% of potential home buyers are also considering renting. Zillows new search allows people to search both rentals and for sale listings and allows search by monthly payment. This appears to be a unique twist in the home search space (that others are sure to join in on).

Here’s my beef with searching by monthly payment. Currently the behind the scenes math calculates a monthly payment based on a 30-year fixed rate loan with 20% down. Rates are pulled from Zillow’s mortgage side. But we all know rates can vary based on multiple factors. And down payment amount vary wildly. Toss in things like HOA fees, PAD fees, and Who Knows What fees and I’m thinking the “search by monthly payment” feature could provide some false results, if not false hope.

“But Zillow said my monthly payment would be $X if I bought this house,” may join the chorus of, “Are you effing kidding me? The Zestimate says my home is worth WAY more than you say it is!”

And speaking of Zestimates, this bodes the question, will Zillow try to Zestify (term (C) Kris Berg) rentals? It wasn’t discussed on the conference call I attended, as I wasn’t as smart as Kris and Jim and failed to ask. But apparently on an earlier call the question was posed and David Gibbons, Zillow’s Director of Community Relations, said that rental Zestimates will not be a part of the launch.

Not. Part. Of. The. Launch. That could be extrapolated into, “maybe we’ll do that when we collect enough data”. Who knows.

In other news, Zillow is also removing the free listings option for manually entered home listings. All listings not provided via syndication or a feed will incur a charge of $9.95 for a six month listing. Of note though is these listings will all be featured, and should enjoy increased exposure over the “old” free listing. Given the multitude of syndication options out there (via which you can still get your listings to Zillow for free), it’s hard to see how anyone could complain about this. But I assure you they will.

There’s more, but this is the gist of it. Kris Berg has her usual brilliant take, and Jim Duncan has a nice compilation of other posts as well. I’m sure there are more floating about the RE blogiverse.

Disclosure for the Blog Police: Zillow.com has some function in hosting/managing this very blog you are reading. But I have received absolutely zero compensation of any form for opining here. Heck, I didn’t even get invited to their party at the NAR Conference in San Diego. And no Sara, I’m never letting that go.

October 24, 2009
By: Jeff Manson
Author’s Website: http://www.adrhi.com

Design your site for your users and not your ego. Lets face it, most users landing on a real estate site are most interested in searching for properties not whether you are a GRI, CRS, CRE, ABR, SRES, etc…. I think you get the point.

I re-designed my site back at the end of 2008. The goal was to give the user more what they wanted and easy for them to get there. If you do that your conversions will drastically increase!! My old sites home page and main area landing pages had several call to actions links like: MLS Search, etc… to get the user to the property search page.  They actually converted alright, but there was definitely a lot of room for improvement.

On the new site we placed the Property Search on the Home and Area pages above the fold. It is easy to use and gets the users quickly to search results. We also started pulling in the newest listings on the area pages so the user could also see they were listings to view in that area (kind of like an example). That also helped with new fresh content.  Another important change was the new contact and sign up forms. We made them pop up in light boxes instead bouncing them to a different page to make it less confusing and a better user experience. All these changes made a huge difference in conversions, bounce rates, pages views per user and actual time spent on the site.  It also increased our returning visitors substantially.

Below are some stats from our analytics comparing them before and after.

Here are some of the old sites bounce rates:
Oahu – 28%, Kauai – 37%, Maui – 31% & Big Island – 30% with an average of 31.5% of all the area pages.

Here are the new websites bounce rates:
Oahu – 15%, Kauai – 13%, Maui 18% & Big Island – 20% with an average of 16.5%. That is a 50% decrease in the actual bounce rate.

Here are some other interesting numbers to look at as well:
The home page also saw a decrease of about 30% in its bounce rate.  Our sign ups went up by 50% mainly because of the way we started doing our sign up forms. The average page views saw a 33% increase and went up to 10.5 page views per user from 7 page views per user.  We also even saw a huge increase on the average time spent on the site from 3:30 minutes to over 6:30 minutes per user.

The next big feature we have been working on is our interactive map search. The goal here is the same. Give the user what they are looking for plus make it simple and easy to use. We think it is very important for the user to be able to scan results and also see the properties on the map. We also think it is a better user experience if the user doesn’t get bounced from page to page and not know how to get back. That is why we display the properties on the left side and the map on the right plus we Ajax in the properties were the map is for the user. They can then page from property to property and easily get back to the map. You can check the beta map search out by doing an advanced search here. Choose your area and then click on map search.

Maybe next time we can discuss ways to improve conversions by using a good lead manager (CRM) and also what you are sending the user as far as email updates.

I would love to hear how you have been able to improve your bounce rates, page views per user and most important, your conversions into real business

FYI: We also did the same thing on this San Diego real estate site and the sign ups went up over 400%. The site design and usability does make a difference no matter what market you are in. For those of you that say your market is unique

We’re happy to announce we have just finished the Local Market Explorer WordPress plugin that creates “city pages” inside the WordPress interface.

While the most important feature of any agent or brokerage Web site is a robust search interface to find homes for sale, one of the questions home buyers — particularly those relocating — are trying to answer prior to looking at listings is “where should I live?” Home buyers spend an immense amount of time researching areas they are interested in living to get a better feel for the area. So, as an agent or broker, having that local information on your own Web site is a huge benefit to being a complete real estate resource for your clients throughout the buying process.

There are a number of great local real estate Web sites built entirely on top of WordPress. For example, Ines Ines Hegedus-Garcia’s Miamism, Heather Elias’ LoCO Musings, and Jim Duncan’s Real Central VA are three that do this. WordPress is a powerful platform that more and more agents and brokers seem to be utilizing by the day. As many of you know, Zillow is big on syndicating our data to other Web sites, so we’re naturally intrigued with anything that can help us with this effort. While widgets are easy to add to sidebars within WordPress, plugins provide added flexibility above and beyond the possibilities of widgets.

There are a couple of WordPress plugins built using the Zillow API, such as the CMA plugin built by Realivent, but this is our first official entry into the Wordpress plugin game. We think there is huge value in adding real estate market information, but there’s even more value to bloggers if all the most relevant information consumers are looking at when researching places to live is included in their city pages — so we teamed with a few other companies who have complimentary datasets. The plugin pulls school data from Education.com, local amenity data from Yelp, photos from Flickr, and of course, real estate market statistics and recently sold information from the Zillow API.

Here are the modules currently included in the plugin, along with a sample screen shot for each one.

Market Statistics:

About (text editable by you) and Flickr Photos:

Market Activity:

School Data:

Walk Score:

Yelp:

Some details:

• You’ll need separate API keys for all the APIs, except for Education.com. The links to the API signup pages are accessible via the settings menu of the plugin.
• The plugin does not support neighborhoods or ZIP codes — yet. We plan to do that in version 2 of the plugin (already in the works).
• The Yelp, Walk Score, Market Activity, and About/Flickr modules can be turned on or off, and we’ll continue to add more flexibility to let you utilize this plugin in a variety of ways with future versions of this plugin.

If you’d like to see an example of the plugin, I’ve installed it on the Geek Estate Blog as a demo. Here are a few sample pages:

• Atlanta
• Boston
• Houston
• Los Angeles
• Miami
• San Diego
• Seattle

Once you install the plugin, how do you actually use the plugin? A couple possibilities:

• Whenever you mention one of your target markets in a blog post, you can link to the city page for that area
• Add links to the city pages to your sidebar. For example, if your target markets are Sammamish, Issaquah, and Redmond — below is sample code for your sidebar:

<p align=”center”><img src=”http://www.yoursite.com/wp-content/plugins/local-market-explorer/images/badges/120lmegraphorange.gif”></p> <ul> <li><a href=”http://www.yoursite.com/local/Sammamish/WA/”>Sammamish</a></li> <li><a href=”http://www.yoursite.com/local/Redmond/WA/”>Redmond</a></li> <li><a href=”http://www.yoursite.com/local/Issaquah/WA/”>Issaquah</a></li> </ul>

You can download the Local Market Explorer plugin here in the WordPress Plugin Directory. If you have questions, please check the FAQs.

The plugin was built by Jonathan Mabe and Andrew Mattie, both of whom have day jobs with Diverse Solutions (a member of the Zillow API program). I have to extend a huge thanks to them for their great work on this plugin.

For the WordPress bloggers out there — what do you think? Do you have any specific requests for the next version of this plugin? Perhaps more market data, a Twitter module, ability to automatically link to your local pages within blog posts, more flexibility to modify the sidebar widget, or a module that brings in data from Wikipedia? Please leave your feedback on this Zillow Advice thread or in the comments field below.