Picturing the Perfect Home
on Realtor.com

Buying a new home requires looking at dozens and dozens of properties, trying to find the one that is right for you. Now, thanks to online realty services such as Realtor.com, buyers can look at properties from the comfort of their own home, at whatever time is convenient for them, and narrow their search to a few houses saving both them and the sales person time leading to a shorter sales cycle.

Realtor.com started in 1996 through an affiliation with the National Realtors Association and the many individual Multiple Listing Services throughout the country. It now has more than two million constantly updated real estate listings. That’s 95 percent of all active listings throughout the industry.

Online real estate listings are now tied with printed newspaper classified listings as the first place to which new buyers turn as they begin searching for a home. However, the online listing is much more effective, because buyers get more information than can be conveyed by just a few lines of text. They can see multiple photos of the interior and exterior of the home and even shots of the neighborhood it is in. Also, many listings now host “virtual tours” that let the buyer “walk through” a home via a web browser, looking up, down, and all around as if they were in the house.

Listings with virtual tours are said to get a forty percent greater click-through rate than those with only “flat” normal photos. Realtor.com offers the virtual tours through a network of independent photographers, who charge around $100 per home for the 360-degree shots. Some buyers have even made a purchase based solely on a virtual tour.

Realtor.com’s basic business is straightforward: it serves as a portal to real estate listings, as the starting-off point for a buyer’s search. It aggregates the listings from hundreds of MLS services nationwide — paying those companies a small fee per listing. But a standard MLS listing generally consists of a photo or two and a little text. Realtor.com, for a fee, then lets agencies and individual realtors “spruce up” the appearance of their listings appear on its site, and on the dozens of affiliates sites that showcase its aggregated MLS data. The site provides simple drag-and-drop software for the agents’ use that sizes and compresses each image; Realtor.com’s servers host the files and distribute them to affiliated sites.

Realtor.com processes a hundred thousand images each month thanks to infoimaging capture devices and online services.

“There just isn’t another lead-generating tool in real estate that is as cost effective.” Jonathon Greenblatt, Vice President of Imaging, Realtor.com.