A company I work with was speaking with the people at Google Adwords about their ad strategy. Google recommended they concentrate more on mobile since the data was pointing to a lot of mobile traffic and many missed revenue opportunities.
After getting over the shock that there are actually people at Google who will talk to you, I became suspicious. I couldn’t imagine people using mobile browsers, particularly those on cell phones, for anything other than a quick look. So I took a look at the site analytics myself. And it was true. Mobile and tablet accounted for about 80% of the site visits with desktop access a measly 20%.
I checked a few other sites I have data for and found similar though not as dramatic results. And I’m not the only one. creGROW‘s Dave Lewand reported mobile traffic increases on the twenty plus CRE sites he’s developed. Even after reading and writing about the rise of mobile, until the facts from your own site hits you in the face, it’s too easy to ignore what it means.
Luckily NAR has had its eye on mobile for a while. Having access to a majority of the home buying public, they can collect data on mobile’s role in the home buying process. Unluckily, CRE has no central organization to collect data and create reports like this, so they have no idea what their customer uses or wants when it comes to mobile or anything else for that matter.
So CRE is left to glean insights from the residential sector – and because it’s not an apples to apples comparison, there’s some danger in that. Maybe commercial users aren’t as heterogeneous a group as home buyers. And even residential can’t help quantifying the value of client portals. There’s no real data on that. But CRE users are often home buyers as well. Their experience with the home search, at least, may very well shape their behavior and expectations as to what should be available for commercial. And NAR found some interesting behavior:
- 89% of home buyers use a mobile search engine to do research and 68% also use mobile apps.
- Search engine usage is more prevalent at the beginning of the process with mobile app usage increasing as the process moves forward.
- 69% of those who take action begin their search with a local keyword combo like “Houston homes for sale”.
- 52% of those who take action on a real estate site came from a search engine.
- Besides reading about specific homes while on mobile devices, buyers get directions, compare prices and features and look for an agent.
Of course, the residential sector already has plenty of mobile apps and mobile friendly site search interfaces so buyers can actually find and easily view what they need. Thanks to the residential IDX data standard, which includes mobile interfaces, any residential firm can fairly easily integrate standard and mobile search into their websites or apps.
Most CRE listing aggregators, while they tend to comply with OSCRE standards, don’t really care about your site’s mobile search interface. They don’t give you access to your listing data so you could create your own mobile search or app either. And they’re certainly not going to give away data in mobile consumer apps like NAR does.
How does an industry that relies on third parties for listing data compete on the mobile search front? The next few posts will offer more insight and some solutions for CRE’s mobile problem.
via:http://creoutsider.com/2014/01/mobile-its-for-real/
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