1000watt Nails Large Broker IDX Strategy

1000watt Consulting wrote a post this week that is a must read. View it here. Brian Boero's point is clear: "If you are a large firm with more than 10% market share – ditch IDX."

Reasons to Act This Way

• Compromised presentation of properties
• Raft of local competitors drafting on your listings
• Paper brokers leverage your data with impunity
• Relatively small number of leads that agents will probably drop the ball on.

I am not going to recant the entire article. Please go and read it. But I do want to reinforce one point and add another.

• Reinforcement – We studied response time to IDX leads. Fifty percent of inquiries get no response, and those that do respond usually do a bad job. Here is a whole white paper on the research. It's real.
• New Point – Consider an IDX/VOW combination website.

When a broker opts out of IDX, they cannot display other broker listings except when the consumer registers!

Once a consumer registers, your broker website becomes more of a buyer client servicing platform. Not only can you display all of the IDX listings, but you can display 100 percent of all information in the MLS other than confidential fields like commission and agent-to-agent comments.

Most consumers are driven to a broker website organically – 68 percent type in the URL. Again, we studied 1 million consumers using broker websites. There is a full paper on it here.

Consumers are looking for the broker's listings. Many brokers have dropped the "Our Listings" tab on their website, which is a mistake in my opinion. Lead with your inventory!

"We represent 58 listings that match your search criteria. View them now or register to see all 486 area listings that match your search criteria." This is not a new schema. This was developed by WolfNet for the Chicago marketplace years ago when brokers would select who could display their listings and who could not (the DOJ terminated this practice). Believe it or not, lead capture was 20 percent higher with an IDX/VOW combination site rather than just an IDX site by itself.

Better yet, if the top five firms in an MLS followed suit, it would devastate the raft of competitors using your firm's data to grow their business.

I am with 1000watt on this point 100 percent. If you are a big broker, opt out of IDX and install a VOW property search for registered buyers. You will thank us for the suggestion.

I will make you a deal. If you are a broker with more than a 10 percent market share and you do this, WAV Group will write a case study on the impact so you can take credit for your leadership.

To view the original article, visit the WAV Group blog.