Mobile is the single most important part of your real estate business moving forward.

This statement holds true for both real estate professionals as they benefit from ever evolving mobile technology available to them and for customers as the adoption of smartphones and tablets continue to gain market share. This white paper will focus on the latter, your customers and their experience with mobile.

Mobile might not be the largest source of your traffic yet, but it's the fastest growing digital avenue, and mobile web traffic will soon overtake desktop traffic.

In 2012, there were 121 million smartphone users and 94 million tablet users in the United States, representing a 31% and 180% increase over 2011, respectively (eMarketer, Search Gets a Mobile Makeover, April 2013). Mobile devices have changed the way consumers interact with businesses, and today's REALTOR® must understand how consumers use different devices to be able to develop and optimize mobile marketing strategies that deliver the right mobile experience to each mobile user.

To better understand the impact mobile traffic has on your business, it helps to take a look at exactly where your visitors are coming from. Direct measurement of visitor behavior is important to gauging the effectiveness and ROI of marketing strategies.

As you can see in Figure 1 at right, nearly two-thirds of all real estate web traffic still comes from desktop computer systems. But that rate has declined each year, and is projected to continue doing so.

Smartphone and tablet traffic (both mobile) combined now makes up 36 percent of real estate web traffic, while mobile apps make up a much smaller, but significantly more engaged crowd of real estate customers.

Mobile engagement

Mobile engagement is as high as it has ever been, and only growing larger.

Think back to 10-15 years ago. Many real estate brokerages felt they needed a website, but also thought it might operate as little more than a digital yellow page.

Shortly thereafter, real estate websites became the primary starting point for home shoppers, and a good site with lead capture capabilities became a quintessential part of an integrated digital real estate business.

Mobile websites are trending the same way, with prospective homebuyers demanding the option to search for real estate on-the-go and quickly locate home details when driving through a neighborhood.

Some brokerages Delta Media Group works with receive 30 percent of their weekday web traffic from mobile devices, but then an astounding 50 percent of weekend web traffic, showing how traffic might trend by day.

As previously noted, mobile already makes up 36 percent of our customers' web traffic. That represents a 40 percent year-over-year increase from July 2012, and a three-fold increase since July 2011.

Just three short years ago, mobile barely made a blip on the traffic radar. But it's projected to exceed half of all customer real estate web traffic by May 2014, as noted in Figure 2.

The trend should not be shocking to those of us who use our mobile devices more and more in our daily business. Mobile, at its core, is about engagement. Cell phones were designed to make communication more portable. Now they've adapted to include other communication options. In two years, not having a mobile real estate website will be no different than not having a phone number.

But not all mobile real estate websites are created equal.

Having a mobile real estate website is only the first step in meeting your customers' evolving needs. The next step is a providing a mobile experience that offers your customers advanced functionality such as map-based property search, the ability to swipe through listing images, and geo-targeted searching.

Additionally, offering an enhanced experience with optimized call-to-action buttons that allow visitors to easily submit showing requests, save the listing to their portfolio, or ask questions instantly is now critical to maintain engagement. These call-to-actions need to be designed intelligently, and strategically positioned throughout the interface to make it easy on the customer to submit the lead without having to overthink or backtrack through the process.

Mobile customers are the most engaged customers because they're often looking for listing details while walking or driving past the listing. Provide them information and the effortless ability to submit a request without even considering visiting another website, and you'll capture a higher percentage of more engaged customers that might be ready to buy.

Read to learn more? Click here to download the full whitepaper.