Roost Changes Up Their Game
We haven’t heard much from Roost, the IDX driven search portal, as of late. Last we heard of them they had redesigned their search pages to deal with a growing overabundance of search filters (see Roost Redesigns Search Results).
But news this week that they have expanded the markets they serve (see Roost Makes Its Nest in Jacksonville, FL) caused me to go back and take another look at the web site.
Turns out they’ve been really busy.
Roost has totally revamped the way that listings are displayed on their site. Under the old system you’d get an abbreviated property description and a handful of photos. For more information you’d click through to their preferred broker’s landing page for that individual property.
While I always liked the speed and functionality Roost provided, this aspect of the search experience was always somewhat problematic.
Any time you pass off that visitor to the broker site the problem is those landing pages are a mixed bag – some look half-decent, most downright miserable. This has been particular beef of mine for a while (see Building a New Real Estate Home Page).
It also causes the user hop back and forth between search results and property pages, making for a confusing and less than optimal experience. Frankly, the same holds true for Trulia too. And this was one of the reasons I’d moved my own personal searches off these sites and onto a more contained experience.
Seems like Roost recognized this problem and has taken steps to rectify this while at the same time changing up the value proposition they deliver to their advertisers.
Under the old model they ultimately were trying to sell the brokers the traffic they generated on their listings but it was up to the broker to capture and convert any visitors into leads.
Now pulling up a property on Roost gives you the full listing description straight from the MLS. No need to go anywhere else.
However, Roost’s advertising brokers show up as the contact information for the listing, brand and all. As a prospective buyer you can choose to schedule a showing or ask that broker for more information on the home. Clicking on any of these links pulls up a more traditional lead capture form, which is then presumably delivered to the advertising broker as a hot lead.
Interestingly, the listing broker is noted but is displayed in tiny grey text. And there is no longer any link to the listing brokers website either.
Other IDX driven search sites certainly use similar lead generation models (Estately comes to mind). But none, to my knowledge, go to quite so great a length to brand and establish other brokers as the primary point of contact for a listing. Certainly many broker web sites do just this when they display IDX listings on their own sites, but it’s definitely interesting to see a third party adopt this type of model.
Nevertheless, as a user, the new experience is far more pleasant and brings it more in line with some of the other online portals. And Roost definitely still rules with the speed it returns its queries.
It may have just regained a spot in my home searching arsenal.
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Galen | Mar 24, 2009 | Reply
These changes were absolutely necessary for them to survive – the old way was very confusing and required a lot of pieces to be in place to work.
Looks like they’re still working to get users (they’re in a lot more markets than Estately!): http://siteanalytics.compete.com/roost.com+estately.com/?metric=uv
David Harris | Mar 24, 2009 | Reply
Whenever a site decides to use licensed idx data from the mls versus cobbling together multiple broker feeds + hand entered listings they have to play by different and much more restrictive rules. Roost is a different concept for most mls’ to get used to. We built remax.com under the same rules: the franchise is treated as a third party site with “hand offs” to broker urls/sites.
Jay Thompson | Mar 25, 2009 | Reply
*Much* better way to provide brokers lead gen. I’d like to see bigger photos, or at least a way to get bigger photos.
Traffic is a concern. If the Compete link Galen posted is even remotely accurate (and they are low but close for my site) then given the markets Roost is in, I’d be worried if I were paying for the service.
Heck, my blog is approaching their entire domains traffic level:
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/roost.com+estately.com+phoenixrealestateguy.com/?metric=uv
jsweez | Mar 25, 2009 | Reply
I too have long hated the experience of flopping from site to site, not knowing where to look and what to expect. Frankly, though, I dropped trulia as part of my search experience when they flooded their site with foreclosure listings that may or may not actually be bank-owned homes and lead you to a subscription site.
Derek Overbey | Mar 25, 2009 | Reply
Thanks for taking another look Joel. More great stuff just around the corner.
Galen & Jay,
Since we are a platform made up of hosted IDX sites with hundreds of unique URLs, reporting services like Compete are unable to roll up our traffic. Rest assured the number is much higher than that.
Kelly | Mar 27, 2009 | Reply
A big change in real estate marketing is comming and needed, i found the article very complete and interesting. I would like to share with the site a new website i found surfing on the net, i found it innovative since it allows the users to upload their propety video at no cost. its name is Novaprop.com, i reccomend you to visit it if you really want to experiment a big change in the real estate business, just some piece of advice.
http://www.advertisingrealestate.org/banner-eng3.swf
Regards,
Kelly
Jonathan Cardella | Mar 30, 2009 | Reply
And there off to the races! Three real estate websites fight for eyeballs…
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/roost.com+estately.com+neighborcity.com/?metric=uv
Jonathan Cardella | Mar 30, 2009 | Reply
I found this post interesting because Roost isn’t the only company showing customers a brokerage other than the listing broker. While the Roost model is to show the sponsoring broker (who provided the IDX feed and presumably ad dollars) the http://www.NeighborCity.com model is to bring back the most qualified local brokers and Realtors® for each given search, neighborhood, and property. For example, a search for San Francisco Real Estate – http://www.neighborcity.com/ca/san-francisco/ provides three local Realtor® profiles, while a click deeper takes you to the Top 50 San Francisco Realtors®. This takes much of the guess work out of finding buy side representation.
Freddy | May 4, 2009 | Reply
I am really interested to know how a third-party site could use Broker A’s listings to generate a lead for Broker B and not be in violation of MLS rules? I understand if the consumer was on Broker B’s website but since they are on a 3rd party portal it would appear to me that MLS rules are being violated. Any MLS Administrator want to explain?
Puzzled,
Freddy