What Buyers and Sellers Want: Be Discoverable, Attract More Contacts

LAS VEGAS – The key to starting and building relationships is making a genuine, personal connection with another person. In real estate, most buyers and sellers start their education online with facts and photos, but there's still a huge opportunity for real estate agents to make a strong online impression that attracts more contacts. Understanding how — and from where — home buyers and sellers gather information to make their decisions can help you find more leads and convert them to clients and sales.

At the Zillow Group Premier Agent® Forum, an annual event which brings together thousands of Premier Agents to meet with Zillow Group leadership, Amy Bohutinsky, chief operating officer, shared the many ways Zillow Group researches consumer behavior and fine-tunes the home search experience that millions of buyers return to time and again: 72 percent of all mobile traffic to the real estate category finds its way to Zillow Group sites. The consumer is king, Bohutinsky asserted.

The personas Zillow Group develops for buyers, sellers and homeowners provide deep insight into what drives their decisions, what causes them anxiety and what makes them happy. The data drives Zillow Group product development so that real estate agents know how most to effectively serve each client.

Buyers and sellers want your professional knowledge and guidance on such an enormous transaction, and Bohutinsky shared some tools real estate agents can leverage to make it easier for consumers to find more information about them online. For example, Agent Finder was built to make it faster and easier for consumers to find and select an agent. The quality of the leads you receive is correlated with the details that contacts can glean from your Zillow Group reviews and ratings; Agent Finder allows you to populate your profile more comprehensively than ever, enabling buyers and sellers to match what they want in an agent with what you have to offer.