In between reading exciting espionage thrillers and inspirational sporting biographies, I like to keep myself honest with a little online real estate statistics. This month I delved into the National Association of REALTORS‘s Center for REALTOR Technology. To save you some time, I cherry picked what I believe to be the most interesting data and what it means for real estate professionals. (Skip to the bottom to get the data, but only if you leave a comment!) You can also view the full report here

What Are Some of The Key Take Aways?

People and Community Matters:

Referrals or word of mouth, are still by far and away the biggest source of business.   Coupled with a high participation in Facebook (78%), it’s just as important to manage your connections and your reputation online as offline. Participating with your network on social media sites and, to a lesser extent, blogs, will keep you in the conversations happening online that then move offline. Although the ROI on social media and blogs sampled as ‘fair‘, think of these channels as more for nurturing leads to a point of sale.

Mobile Matters:

It’s no secret of course: Mobile is here. People are buying up devices in droves.  And real estate is such a ‘mobile’ industry.  REALTORS are increasingly focused on making sure their website is ready, not only to display correctly on a mobile device, but also to offer mobile-friendly tools.  The main needs of real estate buyers are to be able to search for properties, share properties, contact someone about them, and access mapping tools. It’s up to technology companies to be able to provide such tools and for REALTORS to be ahead of the curve in making them accessible to buyers as a lot of fast traffic comes around the bend.

Data Analysis Matters:

It seems that REALTORS are still unsure of some online efforts such as pay-per-click advertising, blogs and social media. This is understandable, since these are still media that require building skills to use them effectively. However, I think part of the problem is that many people do not know how to measure them successfully and don’t understand the metrics that are important. An Analytics package is the bed rock to tying all this together, which allows you to see which sources of traffic are working, what to tune or change and how much energy and effort to put in. Customers won’t necessarily tell you what caused them to choose you, even if they can remember.

A Survey of Realtors were asked:

Where do you learn about new technology for real estate?

Using your mobile device, what REALTOR.org resources would you like to access?

For Real Estate, do you participate in any of the following?

What Return On Investment (ROI) do you receive form efforts in the following?

Social Media:

Blogs:

Which are most important in generating leads?

What ROI do you receive from Pay-Per-Click Advertising?