BHHS Homesale Realty Hits Bullseye with Technology

Executive Summary

Homesale Realty is a Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices franchise serving the markets of Northern Maryland and Central Pennsylvania. The company was ranked 24th in 2015 with 12,694 sides and $2.38 billion in volume. In 2016, they grew to 13,500 sides and $2.6 billion in volume. The company has over 27 offices and 1,200 sales associates. The WAV Group encountered Homesale through a blind assessment of the top 100 real estate firms that revealed an impressive technology offering. Homesale Realty has conquered comprehensive real estate technology integration, driving their increasing success.

The company's growth is striking, given that they underwent a franchise brand shift from Prudential to Berkshire Hathaway. Such realignment typically causes significant website setbacks, but for Homesale the conversion has been well executed, and the company continues to experience online and sales growth. This demonstrates that companies can successfully transition franchises without taking a major business hit.

The core of Homesale Realty's technology footprint is served by Delta Media Group. Delta Media Group provides their broker website, co-branded agent websites, direct feeds to syndication websites, intranet, and single sign-on to applications like DotLoop for transaction management. In addition, Delta Media Group delivers strategies for mobile, social media, and search marketing. The company operates this technology footprint on top of five disparate multiple listing services and their vendors are merging data to power all of the tools for the agents through one seamless platform.

In this case study, we review the technology footprint of Homesale to illustrate how this broker is executing many of the most important online marketing trends today. Our methodology focused on interviews with the company's Director of IT, Sandra Trocccoli, and Chief Financial Officer, Rod Messick, as well as Delta Media Group Chief Executive Officer, Mike Minard. We found that there is a tight working relationship between the management of Homesale and Delta Media Group as exemplified by weekly management calls.

Homesale is highly focused on online marketing via Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM). Our study discovered that their online assets support strong SEO and SEM, which has delivered 75 percent of the traffic to the broker website in addition to paying off in leads and conversions. This success can be attributed to cooperative weekly focus meetings and task dedication by Homesale and their partner company.

In a market where many brokers are relying on portals for prospect hunting, Homesale is effectively attracting both consumers and agents directly. According to Troccoli, customers rave about Homesale.com: "It's the consumer that reinforces our value of our agents, and our relationship with Delta Media Group makes that happen." Homesale is among the few brokerages in America that has perfected a true lead-to-close strategy for transactions, as well as a customer-for-life strategy through customer relationship management.

Broker Website Home Page: #1 Lead Source

The design of Homesale's home page is not particularly unique or distinctive compared to other industry sites. Like the company's competitors, the page is fully optimized for mobile devices and tests flawlessly with a desktop, tablet, and mobile phone device. The banner navigation at the top is clean with multiple calls to action such as: "Connect with Us on Social Media;" "Join," "Find out What You Can Afford," and "What's My Home Worth?" The home page also offers a single search bar for looking up any property on the MLS or county records.

Below the fold of the home page, they display several elements that are key to SEO effectiveness. The page employs an H1 tag for titles like "Maryland Homes for Sale" and "Pennsylvania Homes for Sale" and includes a sample of six listings that update dynamically. The site not only structures the metadata for optimizing SEO, but rewards consumers with results and click opportunities, drawing visitors deep into the site. Homesale's site generates over 120,000 monthly unique visitors with an average of 20.85 page views per visitor and 3:37 average time on site.

Below the active listings, the home page provides two link beds for individual community landing pages. For instance, "Browse Maryland Homes for Sale" contains a list of 36 region-specific community pages such as "Baltimore Homes for Sale." Again, the site employs H1 and H2 tags here, along with several additional community landing pages and the repetition, or keyword density, of the term "Homes for Sale," which is the most used consumer search phrase (e.g., cityname + homes for sale).

Toward the bottom of the page, Homesale furthers their SEO strategy and consumer friendliness by providing a link bed to their 27 offices. While Homesale uses the term, "Our Offices," we recommend rephrasing to "Homesale Offices" which includes the more SEO-friendly equation of 'brokername + office.' We also suggest using 'brokername + city' name as H2 headers in the link bed, as the company has three Baltimore offices that are not currently differentiated by address, just phone number.

Office Landing Pages: High Value SEO Keywords

Office landing pages are micro-sites that, in our view, should appear to consumers like a standalone company website featuring links to the listings, people, and communities served. The top keyword searches for driving high value traffic that are likely to become solid leads involve the name of the brokerage, its offices, and its agents. Homesale achieves this with office URLs that are fairly friendly for consumers' natural language.

For example, one office URL reads: http://homesale.com/balitmoremetro-office. The company could have left out the "–office," but their URL still compares favorably to most broker websites that identify their offices online without valuable keywords. Our research indicates that the consumer is likely to type in a longtail search like "homesale baltimore." Ideally, the company would have a landing page for that term that would display all of their Baltimore offices.

Agent Roster

The agent roster on Homesale's website is fairly typical, simply displaying a headshot and hyperlinked name. We suggest adding phone numbers for individual agents. We observed that they have done an exceptional job of making sure every agent has a headshot.

Office Listings (Featured Listings)

The website effectively enables the consumers to find the listings associated with an office quickly. In addition, the site allows consumers to execute a radius search to show IDX listings served by the region of a particular office.

Office Communities Served

Unfortunately, the website does not include a listing of the communities served by each office. Regardless of the well-known argument that agents can office anywhere and sell anywhere, Homesale is missing an opportunity on these pages to promote their local expertise. In our experience, office pages are more effective when they have statements such as, "Proudly Serving the Baltimore Metro Area." This attracts consumers looking for information on region-specific amenities such as urban living, apartments for rent, townhomes, single family homes, multifamily, and condos.

Hyperlinks to content about the particular lifestyle that each neighborhood offers can also draw more page views and potential leads for brokers. Some brokers are evaluating the effectiveness of tools like Relola to encourage agents to generate property reviews for the homes they visit to increase the consumer value on these pages and highlight the inventory knowledge of their agents.

Social Media on the Office Page

Homesale elected a solid strategy by pointing the office pages to the company social media pages, which displays profiles of both the company and agents. An evolved tactic would additionally include links to the office social media pages for more hyperlocal connection between agents and consumers. But this is rarely executed by any brokerage. We also recommend that brokers leverage playlists on YouTube that are organized by office and by community.

Video on the Office Page

The office webpage does not include videos of the office or the community it serves on the social media pages. We are not surprised, as most office pages do not implement this strategy. However, office landing pages are more engaging with this type of multimedia integration, and the Google search engine results typically push a video to the first page above the fold.

Recruiting on the Office Page

The webpage effectively promotes the Regional President and the Branch Office, which is pivotal in delivering contacts to consumers and potential recruiting candidates. Too often, we see brokerages bury the contact information for the nranch manager in the alphabetically ordered agent list.

Community Landing Pages: High Value Keyword

Homesale's landing pages are nicely optimized for SEO, as they work with Delta Media Group on a weekly basis to analyze keyword success and add content to enhance pages with lower SEO page rank. Homesale has developed approximately 80 community landing pages (e.g. 'cityname + homes for sale') that employs domain names which appeals to search engines. Although consumers doing 'cityname + homes for sale' searches are at the top of the funnel, it is an important keyword search. Among the communities we tested, most portals performed skillfully in optimizing on these keywords, but the first local broker brand we identified most often was HomeSale.com.

Homesale also boosts their SEO rankings with a friendly, natural language description of each community consisting of 250+ words. The site prepopulates the page with 12 active listings that appear fairly random, though perhaps are organized by newest listings. Consumers can search for homes or take advantage of quick links to browse properties by high school, subdivision, and property type. And, the site offers an additional 1000+ words describing the community schools, employment, local activities, community demographics, and more. In addition, consumers can register for Homesale's region-specific electronic new listing alerts. WAV Group published a paper on the effectiveness of lifestyle search, which is nicely executed on Homesale.com.

Each community page also provides useful real estate economic charts showing average days on market, average property price, and listing inventory charted over time. For instance, consumers can learn that the average property price in Lancaster County went from $265k in September 2015 to $310k in September 2016. This online information can attract potential seller leads.

Again, we would encourage Homesale to create community videos. Long and Foster and a number of other leading firms are having a lot of success with their community video strategy.

Subdivision Landing Pages

Delta Media Group built a strong URL structure with solid SEO into the landing pages for every subdivision in the markets that Homesale serves. For even better performance, we recommend incorporating lifestyle characteristics and demographic data for the subdivisions along with agents that specialize in that area. While this tactic may be on the company's marketing roadmap, there are sometimes limitations on the availability of data at the recommended scale, as most sets cover only the zip code or city level.

Brokers have learned that subdivision keywords are a great tactic for outranking portals. Consumers feel an emotional connection to the neighborhood they live in and, in fact, communicate their identity socially by sharing the name of their subdivision. If the subdivision is incorporated in the MLS data, consumers can search by subdivision using most IDX searches. Still, the development of a landing page is a key advancement. Our consumer research in the Houston area indicates that they would prefer local real estate websites that offer rich community data above national portals.

Property Search Results Page

Homesale's property results page looks clean and elegant, simply listing properties that match the search criteria. The page filtering is also similar to that found on any company property search solution. However, a key feature that we applaud is the enabling of consumers to quickly scroll through the photos without having to drill down to the individual listing detail pages. For example, notice the right and left arrows on the primary images below. This convenience increases the user-friendliness of the page.

Housing Stats Landing Page: Bold Innovation!

As an enterprising innovation, each community is also represented by a housing statistics landing page. The site breaks communities down into different property types and allows a single click to view listed properties for sale, as well as contact information for an agent.

Co-Branded Agent Websites

Homesale delivers an excellent strategy for their co-branded agent websites. Every agent has an electronic business card site that displays basic contact information. The second tier shows the agent's listings. The third tier, which nearly 300 agents opt-in to for a monthly fee, is a full-blown IDX website that includes design support, full service content management, and compliance review.

"It gives the agents the ability to leverage our technology infrastructure or choose to follow their own technology path," said Messick, in a statement that probably reflects the strategy of most brokers in America. We appreciate Homesale's intention of not forcing agents into buying the broker's technology, although it is available if they would like it.

Listing Syndication: 6th Most Effective Online Strategy

Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices franchise group provides Homesale with direct syndication to a variety of online publishers. This strategy is not a leading source of lead or traffic generation for the firm, despite the preferential treatment that their listings get.

"While direct syndication is popular with many agents and consumers, our data analytics with Delta Media Group found that this strategy actually delivered less leads than one would expect," Messick explained. "In fact, portals ranked sixth on our list of customer lead generation activities."

Social Media Marketing: 4th Most Effective Online Strategy

Besides SEO and SEM, Homesale works each week with Delta Media Group to review their social media marketing efforts. Together, the companies are capitalizing on Facebook by managing an active community page featuring engaging content, such as community events, in addition to targeted advertising. While this is effectively driving traffic to the broker website, Troccoli admits, "It's hard to engage agents in our page; they tend to focus more on their own pages."

Delta Media Group's execution of the marketing program offers impressive design and organization. The company embedded some useful features like a "Call Now" button. In addition, the "Search Homes" navigation provides access to Homesale's entire website, which coordinates well with the site's responsiveness.

Future Features: Off-Market Property Pages

Homesale's executive leadership communicated appreciation for the strong relationship that they have with Delta Media Group.  Representatives from both companies meet regularly to strategize about improving performance, which is pretty unusual in the industry from our perspective. Most brokers consider their website vendor sufficient if their website works and they do not hear from the technology provider. In comparison, Delta Media Group's approach to their customer relationship is more hands-on and consultative.

When Messick learned from colleagues at BHHS Fox and Roach that off-market property pages were having a profound impact on driving seller leads and search engine optimization, Homesale worked with Delta Media Group to create a custom solution for developing the same types of landing pages. Homesale recently launched this off-market lead generation program and the results have been immediate. Future opportunities for driving seller engagement are very encouraging.

Messick stated, "The most exciting thing about working with Delta Media Group is that they listen and they respond. If we see something that seems to be working, or imagine something that we can do better, Delta delivers." The company expects that they will see extraordinary growth in consumers visiting off-market listings on their site.

The new off-market landing pages are completely integrated into Homesale's website, providing a page for every parcel in the areas that the company covers. With this new strategy, Homesale is building permanent SEO on every address, not just the active listings. We look forward to seeing the long term impact that this has for Homesale as they continue to raise the bar for broker online effectiveness.