Real Estate Marketing & Beyond
Nearly everyone is viewing real estate online these days. The staggering statistics that show over 95% of home buyers now begin their home search somewhere on the internet have all been well-documented and written about by web marketing professionals for quite some time now, but what really continues to be gaining more and more momentum in the world of ever-changing web technology is the progression of responsive design real estate websites.
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Responsive web design, also commonly referred to as RWD, is a rapidly growing design technique that allows for a website to automatically adjust its settings depending on what device someone may be using to access that site. Now that surfing the web has become mainstream and almost routine from smaller mobile devices like a Smartphone or tablet, providing users with an optimal viewing experience that allows for easy reading and navigation functionality is becoming a critical aspect in properly engaging and capturing a target audience.
In the real estate industry specifically, home buyers now want to be able to view property listings, photos of homes, and read all your neighborhood or community information in a way that’s most convenient and easiest for them to use—and tablets and Smartphones are overwhelmingly starting to take over that reign. Just last week, an article from Digital Trends projected that by the end of 2013, tablet sales will completely exceed traditional PC sales, which by no means should surprise anyone even slightly keeping current on all the latest technology trends happening on what seems to be a daily basis.
In 2011, when tablets were just exploding onto the tech scene, consumers bought nearly 67 million tablets worldwide. This year, sales should easily surpass 100 million. There’s no denying the impact of mobile technology and how it’s continuing to shape how we get our information or shop for all the latest and greatest stuff to hit the market—which of course, includes real estate. So if the way you generate the bulk of your business is through a high-performance website and a strong web-marketing campaign, providing that user-friendly, state-of-the-art mobile experience should probably be the next thing you check off that never-ending to-do list; and by all accounts, it would seem like this item, for the most part, should be done sooner rather than later.
Joe Heath is a graduate of Indiana University and also holds a Graduate Certificate in Real Estate Development from Drexel University. After working as a Market Research Associate at Hanley Wood Market Intelligence in Chicago, Joe now works as a Web Marketing Specialist and is a managing partner at Real Estate Web Creation, LLC.
Making your website device agnostic is crucial nowadays. Most of our customers include this as one of the main requirements and it’s not hard to understand why. Thanks a lot for a great post.