Tag: GLVAR

GLVAR changes their mind on allowing MLS Feeds to Zillow and Listhub

My prior post spoke of the fact the Greater Las Vegas Association of Realtors had chosen to cut off their MLS feeds to Zillow and Listhub. This evidently caused quite the backlash from agents, teams and smaller brokerages in the Las Vegas/Henderson real estate market.

A press release(Below) from GLVAR stated after hearing concerns this month from many of its members, they have reconsidered and will now continue to share the MLS data to Zillow and Listhub as they explore other options.

Local agents and brokers communicated to the MLS that removing Zillow and Listhub from the feeds could create a hardship and would detract from the way they did business. I know all of my Las Vegas clients were really upset there was a potential that their listings would not show up on Zillow. Many of them get asked on their listing appointments if their listings would be on Zillow, Realtor and many of the home search networks out there.

No matter what side of the fence you are on about MLS data feeds and Zillow, you have to give GLVAR credit for listening to it members and having the guts to change their mind. Who knows what the future holds in this ever evolving real estate industry.

Press release dated November 15th 2018

GLVAR Zillow Listhub MLS

GLVAR is going to end automatic syndication with Zillow and Listhub in January

Update 11/16/2018

GLVAR changes their mind on allowing MLS Feeds to Zillow and Listhub

I read a Facebook post today that the Greater Las Vegas Association of REALTORS®(GLVAR) was going to cease syndicating to Zillow and Listhub on in January of 2019. They evidently did the same thing with Realtor.com a year ago. Here is a Video from GLVAR discussing syndication.

Update: 11/10/2018

There WAS a video here, the same YouTube video shared within the Inman News article, but it looks like GLVAR took it off of YouTube or made it private. Why would that be? My personal opinion is it clearly communicated a greater alliance to the big brokers and not what might be best for the home sellers.

Personally? I don’t buy it. The consumer comes first. I look at it this way. If I am a Realtor® and take a listing in the Las Vegas/Henderson area, I want that listing broadcast to the world. I want that house to sell as quickly as possible to serve my client. If that sale is the result of some Realtor® getting a lead from Zillow, I would not care where the sale came from. The seller wants to sell their home as quickly as possible. The seller doesn’t care about the politics. They don’t care whether the agents or brokers like Zillow or not. They just want their house sold.

Consumers looking to buy a house want to jump online and start searching whether they have retained a buyers agent or not. Based upon research I conducted online:

How many visitors does Zillow have each month: 188 million (8/26/18)

Percentage of us homes that have been viewed on Zillow: 80% (5/19/18)

Number of homes on Zillow updated by users: 80 Million (8/26/18)

Number of U.S. homes listed in the Zillow database: 110 Million homes (8/26/18)

It’s safe to say that Zillow is a dominant home search engine and any consumer or Realtor® would want their home showing up in their search results.

Now, just as stated in the Inman article that posted today, the response from Zillow is spot on. If a small broker wants their listings to be in the search results, they may have to spend tens of thousands of dollars for a custom API to do so. I think there is probably some truth that the big money brokers want to get in the way of the small brokerages.

What if you are an agent with a small brokerage and on the listing appointment the client asks if their property is going to be on Zillow? When you tell them no, what effect will that have on getting the listing?

Full disclosure. I am not a Realtor®. I do however, act as the marketing coordinator for a number of teams throughout the U.S., including a very successful team in Las Vegas. I will need to find out if my team’s brokerage plans on feeding to Zillow. If not, how will this effect my client?

CJ Hays, Marketing Emancipator for Agent Reputation

These opinions are my own.

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Site Load Time Review Sites Cannot Quantify Real Estate Websites

There are a number of websites that ask you to type in your URL, wherein they will scrub your website looking for errors that may effect your SEO including load speed and other processes running within your website. Many of these sites hope and pray they find negative results so they can sell you their SEO services. Others are just there to help.

Some of these sites are simple like Website Grader that will point out a few generic things with no actionable items. And of course they need your e mail address for the purposes of pushing the SEO services of HubSpot. Then you have other systems like GtMetrix that are over the top GeekSpeak and the layperson Realtor does know what the results mean.

These website review systems can be fairly accurate for 99.9% of the businesses in the world. However, this does not hold true for real estate websites that contain IDX’s, MLS feeds and many third-party lead capture technologies running on the homepage of your website. I will offer my observations in as simple terms as possible without getting too geeky.

A website is a container. Most business websites contain fairly basic pages. Mostly text, images, inventory, e commerce pages, about us, blogs, contact. Maybe a few have pop up newsletter sign ins. They will load quickly and have above average SEO scores. Then at the other end of the spectrum you have NEWS websites that are so third-party advertising heavy, they take days to load and are very intrusive with pop up ads, video ads and will even hijack your browser. They could care less about their horrible SEO scores. Somewhere in the middle would be real estate websites.

Most Realtor websites give the consumer the ability to search for homes. This search is taking place via any number of IDX, RETS and other database technologies that are providing MLS data in a consumer-friendly format, specifically to convert the user into a lead. This is “live” data coming from third parties. The IDX may be feeding data, but most of the time the images of the homes are being fed directly by your MLS. Since this data is called to your website from third parties, while your base website load time may be fast, it can be slowed down by technologies these testing services are not taking into account.

One issue are MLS’s that do not provide thumbnails of their image feeds. The images are coming in at full size (even if they look like thumbnails). GLVAR and over half the MLS’s in the US are not providing thumbnail images. The website is having to resize the larger images which causes speed test issues, since all these tests recommend loading images at exactly the right size for the space. An example would be having featured listings on your homepage. The more featured listings you have, even if in a carousel, all those images have to load. Or maybe you have an interactive map that shows active listings. The images and data of the properties within that map may have to load. The MLS image feed to your site is usually the slowest loading element.

We have been seeing a trend of Realtors asking for huge slideshows or videos to run at the top of their sites. Those are all large media files that have to load. Social media share functions, newsletter sign ups, what’s my home worth pop-ups and others can slow down a real estate website.

There are always things you can do or hire somebody to do to optimize your website. But you have to take into consideration you have a real estate website with an IDX. You cannot compare your speed results to non-real estate websites. You need to compare your results to the Zillow’s of the world and other real estate websites that are in your market. You would be surprised at just how jacked up their websites are.

I mentioned WebSite Grader above. It was used on a real estate website and their system pointed out three things

    • Page Speed: It said the site took 10 seconds to load. They had a statement that read, “Best-in-class websites should load in 3 seconds. Any slower and visitors will abandon your site, reducing conversions and sales”. OMG, sounds really scary! Rarely does a real estate website load in 3 seconds that has an IDX and let me introduce you to a concept related to this. Does the site take 10 seconds to load or does it “feel” like it took 10 seconds to load? Case in point. A visitor shows up on your website. You have a video at the top, 6 featured listings and a live listings map combined with any other data, images and pop ups on your homepage. Are they looking at a blank page because it is taking 10 seconds before they see anything? Or are they seeing a complete load though there are still some data calls going on in the background? You may have a few background load issues but if the consumer is seeing everything on your homepage within a few seconds, they are certainly not bouncing as the review system would suggest.
    • Page Requests: They state, “The more HTTP requests your website makes, the slower it becomes.” Every property you feature on your homepage is a request. The data is a request. The image is a request. The resizing request on the large images is a request. Maps are a request. Properties within the map are requests. There are social share requests. In the background you may have Facebook, Google and Adwerx pixel requests. Then you have Google analytics, which is a request. As a Realtor, unless you don’t want an IDX on your homepage, you will have more requests then the average business.
    • Page Size: They state, “The heavier the site page, the slower the load. For optimal performance, try to keep page size below 3MB.” 3 MB’s? Are you kidding me? Basically a blank page made up of mostly text and a couple of images…on a real estate website? If you want this kind of speed, remove the IDX from your homepage along with any videos, slideshows and other background processes.
    • Mobile Speed: If your website mobile speed is near 100% all is well with the world since more people are hitting you from mobile then desktop.

Two take-a-ways:

At the end of the day, you need to find a balance between trying to increase your “site” speed versus the “user experience” speed.

Website review systems do not take into account the conversion elements within real estate websites. You have to compare apples to apples when representing yourself online in your specific market.