When Ilanna Ball opened RE/MAX Finest in Woonsocket in June 2004, she invested right away in a Web site. Now she has two: a personal one, www.ilannaball.com, complete with listings, and www.finestrealestateteam.com. Both link to the RE/MAX national listings.
The sites are tools to gain visibility, she said. “It is brand-name awareness. You want to be on the top of somebody’s mind when they’re going to buy a home.”
Most real estate agents have Web sites, and the Rhode Island Association of Realtors has built its own site, www.riliving.com, into a major resource for homebuyers. It’s a recognition that, as Ball put it, “inevitably, our clients always use the Internet” – and an effort to use the medium to their advantage, rather than let it create competition for them.
The Web, after all, is home to services such as ISoldMyHouse.com, where homeowners can market their homes without an agent. And it allows sellers and buyers alike to research the market, get a sense of the prices and learn what properties are available.
How many go on to complete transactions independently is harder to tell. The best proxy for that number is the difference between the Realtors’ 2006 reported sales – 8,313 single-family homes – and sales recorded by The Warren Group, a Boston-based tracker of real estate data that recorded 9,529 single-family home sales during 2006. That would mean 1,216 houses, or about 12.8 percent of the properties sold, did not involve a Realtor (though that doesn’t mean they involved an independent Internet listing, either).
Cecile Cohen, president of the Realtors association, said the Web “has actually helped Realtors.” Statistics show 80 to 85 percent of homebuyers start their search on the Internet, she said, “and then they lift up the phone and call the Realtors.”
“I think, in the end, the Realtor’s knowledge is always going to beat out the Internet,” Ball said.
Much of the draw of the Internet is the capacity to search for properties that fit specific parameters and even getting to virtually “tour” them online. Some customers then do the “proverbial drive-by,” Cohen said, “but then when they want to get serious, they end up working with a real person. It has not been the death knell of real estate that had been predicted in the 1990s and early 2000s – I think it’s actually been a boon to real estate.”
And Web sites are not only being used as places to post for-sale homes – www.zillow.com, which boasts that it has about 70 million homes listed, will list a “Make Me Move” price, which is “that magical number you just can’t refuse” for houses not already on the market.
To keep up with the changing times, the Rhode Island Association of Realtors has updated its code of ethics to cover Internet issues. The latest version, for example, warns against misleading customers with “metatags, keywords or other devices/methods to direct, drive, or divert Internet traffic, or to otherwise mislead consumers.” •
