New Real Estate Book Website Review

The new Real Estate Book website provides an excellent value to their print advertisers—extending the effectiveness of print advertising to the internet. They support consumers who start their buying or selling process by picking up a magazine. They support their advertisers by providing a website that effectively competes for online consumers against the top sites for search engine optimization.

The realestatebook.com impressed us when we began typing. Like the best online forms the system automatically ‘guesses’ what you are typing as you enter each letter of text. As I began to type in my city name, it auto-filled, and it immediately showed me homes near to our address. We were hoping that it was noting our ISP address and finding nearby properties, but, unfortunately, after a few refreshes of my browser, we realized that the first listing was a fluke—random luck.

The search results for the city of Arroyo Grande came up very quickly. Along with it came some featured agents and agent banner advertising.

Unfortunately, the execution of agent photos in the ads showed issues with automatically sizing photos incorrectly.

Agent and broker branding are nicely displayed on the site—giving preference to the agent over the broker. All of the customary lead tools are in place—contact the agent, save a listing, cool social networking sharing tool.

There was a gross amount of listing detail missing on the listing, though this may be due to the data available in their feed. It seems like they publish whatever information the advertising agent or broker provides with no augmentation from other available data sources.

Another nice feature is the fact that they include the property address in the URL structure of each listing. This is excellent for Search Engine Optimization—the listing came up number two in Google for an address search, immediately behind REALTOR.com® and ahead of Trulia and Zillow.

• Global Wolf Broker Website and Extranet
• Settlement Room by Emphasys
• Property Info's SureClose