Real estate in the digital age, analysis of the evolution of our business and real estate web portals

With the advent of the Internet and the improvement of digital equipment, our business has changed. Cheaper and much faster, emails with attachments has gradually replaced the traditional postal system, which is now in the minority, in the same way that digital cameras have gradually replaced film cameras! It is now possible to see dozens and dozens of real estate listings from your home or office, and unlike the time constraints of using pronted advertising (printing deadlines, expiration of information, etc.)., internet ads can be created and deleted in a few clicks of the mouse. Whilst all this has evolved, the basics business principles still remain the same ... listening to customers, knowing the market, specific legal and geographical issues, etc. are still the most important elements for providing quality service!

The most visible elements of the internet housing market are multi-ad portals, multi-agency web sites (such as seloger.com, logic-immo.com, avendrealouer.fr, etc..), as well as sites that regroup real estate adverts and property adverts from agencies or independents (Leboncoin.fr, etc.).

The enormous volume of referenced web pages (some of which have migrated from Minitel taking previous customers with them) can be added to wide spread communication (TV commercials, magazines, etc.). They now occupy the first place.

Even though the majority of real estate portals are of a high quality (the worst ones are never visited or have already been removed), the main criticism generally targeted at these portals is how common it is to find the same ad with the same pictures from one site to another (a case of duplication of content), sometimes even within the same site, from two agencies normally considered as competitors (e.g. a delegation of mandates with the same information being re-used by both agencies). Note that this information is generally copied from agency websites, which consequently disables the search engine optimisation because, with equivalent announcements, it is relatively difficult to overtake a portal whose Google confidence level is often much higher.

Another criticism seems to be the poor quality of visitors to the high end product pages. We began to dream ... but in the end, from a certain price bracket (which varies according to the sector), the number of genuine buyers compared to the number of visitors decreases greatly. This is why specialised high-end product portals have recently been created.

In addition, despite the overall volume of visitors to the most important of these real estate portals, some categories of properties and certain geographies benefit more than others. The ratio of the number of ads available to the number of visitors to these sites is rarely better than with a quality agency web site such as ours.

We now need to know how to play in the digital world and must avoid being fooled by misleading generalities, because sometimes bigger is not always best!