School Attendance Zones: Do You Know Where Your Children Are?

According to a Redfin study published in 2013, homebuyers are willing to pay on average $50 more per square foot, in order to purchase a home zoned for a higher quality school. In 2013, the National Association of Realtors released statistics showing that 40% of homebuyers had school aged children and 25% of all purchases were directly influenced by the quality of the school district/zone. To cement the fact that schools are important to home buyers, NAR also published that only 3% of people were willing to compromise on the quality of a school.

There is a clear connection between a homes value and the attendance zone it falls within. The statistics show that people pay more and actively seek out homes that they feel will have a positive impact on their children's learning. Some leading players in the real estate world already provide school zoning information to their online users, including Trulia, Redfin and Zillow. Without further ado, below are four ways your company can utilize school attendance zone boundaries to have a major impact on your website.

• SEO - We all know SEO is the name of the game. One way to increase SEO is to make your website bigger, literally. Imagine having a page for every school attendance zone in the country residing on your server. Each of these pages can be populated with detailed information about the schools and homes that fall within the boundaries. The possibilities are endless for creativity and uniqueness. No matter how you slice it, this approach will give you a significant SEO boost and help you get real results on Google.
• IDX Enhancement - Tag your listings to the appropriate attendance zones that they fall within. Then enable your users to search via attendance zones. Not only will this be a unique function for your IDX but it will also make it easy for your potential home buyers to locate a home that is zoned for a great school. A secondary piece of this is displaying the attendance zone on each listing page that you already have on your site. This will add more content to the page and give the user more information they care about.

• Options - Give your potential homebuyers options! Many families that are looking to move have more than one child. Often, they are a few years apart in age. This means is it fairly common to have one child attending high school while the other is heading off to junior high school, or perhaps still in elementary school. Make sure you have the ability to allow the home buyer to find the perfect home for them that is zoned for a great high school as well as an excellent middle school. Giving your prospective buyers this functionality will help your agents win their business.
• Drip Marketing/Lead Generation - Many firms and technology vendors already practice this. If you have a family of four that is looking to relocate, it's a good idea to keep them interested by sending them a newsletter or an email once a month of homes that are zoned for good schools. This is also a great way to prospect for new leads. A potential home buyer will take notice that your agents are not sending out typical mass mailings. Instead, create something unique that will catch their attention by being tailored to a family's wants and needs.

There are many ways to utilize school attendance zones. They are an important factor in many peoples' home buying decisions. Onboard updates its boundaries multiple times per year and goes well beyond standard NCES (National Center of Education Statistics) data. We have detailed information about each school a user might want to see. Imagine being able to help your prospects locate a home that is zoned for a high school that has a Great Schools rating of 10 and an elementary school that has an after school program. Amazingly, that is possible.

Take a second look at your current school offering. How could it be improved? It's time to allow people to search for homes in ways that truly fit their needs.

To view the original article, visit the Onboard Informatics blog.

For more on providing web visitors with school attendance zone data, watch our webinar below: