Don't be tricked by real estate agents saying over a thousand visitors have viewed your property on the internet.

It makes me shake my head when I hear a real estate agent saying a property has had over a thousand visitors on the internet. Most of those visitors, if they exist at all, aren’t interested in your property and thus that number is close to worthless.

The only real way you could get a reasonable number as to the number of people who potentially may be interested in your property is to log the visitors and have access to those logs. Then by analysing those logs you may have a chance to get a real indication. Keep in mind that a third of traffic on the internet are often robots indexing pages. Then you have a consider number of people harvesting information for republishing, or collecting for other purposes such as trying to sell related services to people selling properties. Then you have other agents checking out competitors properties and then you have the agents themselves who may be referencing the information multiple times a day.

In the end the reality is there are only a few hundred properties sold a year in a postcode area and if you had 2-3 buyers for your property, the market would be booming and you’d get a great price.

The best way to get real information from the internet is to have gain access to the logs relating to your property.  For one real estate agent I set up a site which was linked to from advertising on realestate.com.au next to sold properties. The agent paid $700 for the advertising. During the time the only visit they had was when realestate.com.au set up the advertisement for them. So if you hear figures of thousands of visitors to view your home on the internet, I’d treat the information and the agent with suspicion. It’s just a sales pitch. If you want real information I’m more than happy to set up an image and if you get the image linked to from the online advertising site, I can provide you with real statistics on how many visitors there are viewing the image. Using real information helps you make better decisions and the internet now provides the tools which can cut through the marketing hype.

 

Kelvin Eldridge

Online Connections

www.OnlineConnections.com.au

Call 0415 910 703 for computer advice and support.