Dan shops for real estate from his desktop. That's how he found you. He visited your real estate website, submitted a lead, and you answered. You've worked with him for several months and he just hasn't found the right house for his family yet.

Dan is also a mobile customer. He checks his email from his smartphone, searches homes while waiting in line at the local coffee shop, and occasionally relies on his smartphone to look up listings for sale in the area he drove through.

Dan is your customer...but only half the time.

When shopping from his desktop, he's using your website and the resources you've provided him. When shopping from his mobile phone, he found your desktop website difficult to navigate. The property search was hard to locate and use. The font was too small. He had to scroll side to side too much, even when zooming. And all those elements designed in Flash don't display, while some of those in JavaScript don't render correctly on his smaller smartphone screen. He can't even find your website when Googling it from his smartphone, because your desktop-optimized site doesn't rank well in mobile searches.

He has since found a mobile-optimized website that he likes much better, but it's not yours. When trying to get quick answers on properties, he has found it much easier to submit them through that website rather than copy the MLS number and contact you about them.

At first, Dan tried to keep in better contact with you about what he likes. But he found himself shopping more and more from his mobile device, and his portfolio on your website doesn't sync with it because it's someone else's site. He creates a portfolio through that mobile website, and it's slowly growing larger than his portfolio on your site.

Dan is inching toward working with another real estate agent and you don't even know it. Your marketing tools are good, but they're just not what Dan needs. They don't give him the capabilities of shopping the way he wants to at all times. He worked around that at first, but as time has gone on and Dan keeps looking for homes, he has lost patience and just wants to shop and get answers to his questions more easily.

Unfortunately, you might not realize this is occurring until Dan is already gone. He won't leave you as an agent until he's already working with your competitor.

It's not an easy breakup, but a breakup it certainly is.

Mobile business is critical, and growing more and more important for real estate professionals. We can't emphasize that enough. And yet, it's still the last thing many real estate agents and brokerages think of.

Flip the scenario. Now you're the agent with a powerful mobile real estate website, while most of your competitors have no mobile presence. Those agents and brokerages have worked hard to earn leads and drive visitors to their websites, but those customers start growing antsy when they have no solid mobile site to utilize.

So they conduct their own search and find your mobile site. Initially, that's nothing more than a way for them to more easily search homes. But as time goes on, they use your site more and more. Soon, they don't want to go back to the desktop site they previously used because yours is so much easier to use.

Your future gains and losses in market share will be heavily influenced by your mobile real estate presence. If you haven't already, it's time to secure your mobile business presence today.

To view the original article, visit the Delta Media Group blog.

For More Information

• See Staggering Mobile Traffic Growth: What Brokerages Need to Know Now
• Download Delta's Free Guide to Mobile Engagement