A FEW years ago, people advertising homes on the Internet were racing to employ the latest gimmicks: 360-degree photographs to show off spacious living rooms, mortgage calculators to pinpoint monthly carrying costs, even videos of agents to talk about a home’s attributes.
Today, companies and brokers are focusing less on toys and are offering something more straightforward: numbers. This detailed information — be it local home values, neighborhood amenities or broader market conditions — is part of a trend to attract consumers by offering data they cannot find easily elsewhere, or could once get only from real estate agents.
Maisha Cannon, who recently sold her home in Paramount, Calif., first contacted Mike Rode of Keller Williams Realty, who e-mailed her back with detailed data about recent sales trends in her market.
Ms. Cannon, a 29-year-old recruiter for the University of Southern California, said Mr. Rode had accessed the data through a new tool for brokers called Market Snapshot — which was an improvement over traditional packets of comparable properties that other brokers provide.
“The chart and graphs were all in the e-mail,” she said. “Someone else might send you a general e-mail and a spiel.”
When she interviewed agents to decide with whom to list the property, she used the information from Mr. Rode to see if the other agents were on target. Ultimately, she listed the property with Mr. Rode, and the sale price tracked with the data he sent her.
The process, she said, was “seamless and easy.”
Offering packages of detailed data is becoming a new method for brokers to build their clientele and a way for general Web sites to feed consumers’ interests. Last month, the search engine Yahoo entered a partnership with a nonprofit site named Greatschools.net to offer buyers detailed data to compare schools.
“In the past, people would, say, send a pumpkin at Thanksgiving or send a calendar,” said Errol Samuelson, president of Top Producer Systems, the company that produces Market Snapshot as a division of Move.com, which owns several large real estate and housing sites like Realtor.com. “Our perspective is, if you provide real information instead of another refrigerator magnet, you set up the foundation for a relationship.”
Of course, the explosion of detailed real estate data online has produced confusion as well. For example, with the popular house valuation Web sites — including Zillow.com and Trulia.com — the results on values for a half-million-dollar house can range from $400,000 to more than $600,000.
The companies that run these sites offer a simple explanation: We employ better methodology than the competition. In other words, our data can beat their data.
Zillow.com, which was inaugurated last February, uses flashy maps imposed on color aerial photographs of neighborhoods, and gives estimated values for individual houses.
After the start of Zillow.com, a handful of sites cropped up offering similar services.
Within a month, even the giant Realtor.com, which in recent years had not offered the sale prices of comparable listings online, had a new feature on its front page that gave consumers a starting point to assess their property values.
Allan Dalton, president and chief executive of Realtor.com, said that the feature had already been in the works, and that the start of Zillow “reinforced that we had the right plan.”
Realtor.com, which works in partnership with the National Association of Realtors, designed the feature to help a seller find an agent who could give a professional assessment of the value of a property, not simply state a value.
“If you tell a house seller that a home value is preordained, the home seller is not going to seek someone to get the best price,” Mr. Dalton said. “We represent both the homes and the professional. At the end of the day, people need to have expert advice.”
This approach differs from that of sites like Zillow.com, whose goal is to attract an audience for its information and to sell advertising on the basis of the size of that audience.
Within a few months of its opening, however, Zillow attracted some unwelcome attention. In October, the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, a nonprofit consumer group in Washington, filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission that contended that inaccurate valuations on the site, both high and low, were damaging the interests of all consumers and particularly the interests of working families.
The complaint has yet to be resolved, but a spokeswoman for Zillow was careful to point out the site’s disclaimers.
“We’re a starting point,” said the spokeswoman, Amanda Hoffman. “We’re not a crystal ball. It’s the Internet. You sort of have to take everything you read on the Internet with a grain of salt.”
Beyond the growth of home valuation sites, companies and individual real estate brokers are developing other methods to win customers with information online.
When Barbara G. Cox trains real estate brokers, she says, she encourages them to go beyond listings and use the Web to position themselves as specialists. For example, a specialist in horse properties can use a site to demonstrate knowledge about stabling, feeding and grooming.
“I’m telling them, in positioning, you have to distinguish yourself,” said Ms. Cox, co-author of “Internet Marketing in Real Estate” (Prentice Hall, 2000) and instructor of a course in real estate technology at Saddleback College in Mission Viejo, Calif.
This approach improves upon older, less effective tactics like “talking head” videos of agents on Web sites, Ms. Cox said. “That’s not what most buyers go to the Web site for,” she said.
Kristal Kraft, a broker with the Berkshire Group in Denver, has found this approach so effective that she now shies from giving seminars about the Internet to other agents. In fact, she said, she has had to take legal action against agents who have plagiarized her site.
Ms. Kraft built a Web site — and a clientele — with the idea of reaching buyers who need to relocate to Denver.
The site, kristalsellsdenver.com, offers features like cost-of-living comparisons matching Denver against other cities. It also gives profiles of 27 neighborhoods, which include information on average age, percentage of families with children and drive times to city landmarks.
The site also has a section titled “My Favorite Places,” which, in a breezy, personable narrative, features Ms. Kraft showing off amenities ranging from the local stock show to the Denver Children’s Museum.
Ms. Kraft said that she started developing the Web site 10 years ago after she moved to Denver from Colorado Springs, because she had no clientele in town. As a result, she became a specialist in helping outsiders move to Denver. In the end, she said, the specialized approach she developed through the Web site shaped the future of the brokerage itself.
“That’s really the only way to do it,” she said. “You can’t be a generalist.”
Ms. Kraft’s site, like most others, became more sophisticated over time. But for agents who do not want to do all the workthemselves, many companies offer tools that they can use in Web sites or in e-mail to potential clients.
In the last year, Top Producer Systems has developed tools for agents, like Market Snapshot, that go beyond listings.
Mr. Samuelson, president of the company, said these tools could help agents counter publicity about slumping real estate markets by showing that some local markets are thriving.
Introduced in November, Market Snapshot offers sophisticated, full-color arrays of maps and data that show how quickly houses sell in a neighborhood, the average selling price and even the ratio of list prices to sale prices.
Agents can use it on their Web sites, or they can send it to potential clients by e-mail.
The company also offers community snapshots that list churches, theaters, recreation centers and side-by-side comparisons of schools. The reports can draw from as many as 4,000 types of data about a community.
As an extension of pure data about communities, Realtor.com is planning to add some consumer opinion, a feature that follows somewhat in the style of online retailers like Amazon.com.
Mr. Dalton said the company was developing a feature that would allow people who live in a community to comment on the site about schools, restaurants and other amenities.
He conceded, of course, that public opinion could be tricky to manage in a high-stakes sales environment. He said that site administrators planned to allow residents to make recommendations — but that the site would employ editors to keep watch.
“It won’t be the wild, wild West,” he said.