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Long Island New York

 East End EXTRA!!

News about real estate on the
East End of Long Island -- Jan 18, 2001

HREO.com vs Hamptons.com - Which WebSite Provider Should You Select and How to Select Your Provider

This article explores the pros and cons of placing your website on HREO.com (Hamptons Real Estate Online) vs Hamptons.com (Hamptons Online) - the two leading website providers for the Real Estate industry on the East End.

Important Information in this Article Includes:

• Why the average Real Estate agency is likely to get four times as many leads from a Hamptons.com website as from an HREO website.
• Substantial differences in the quality of service offered with HREO and Hamptons.com, such as: 1) It takes as long as three weeks to get pictures onto an HREO site; 2) Clumsy and time-consuming input procedures with HREO; 3) Listings often remain on the HREO site months - some remain years - after they have been taken off the market!
• HREO prices to the Real Estate agencies vary all over the lot - Real Estate agencies with the same website service pay $400 per month or $1,200 per month or anything in between. Want to get HREO service free for a year? Threaten to leave HREO for a competitor. You might get it for free, but free may not be a good price for you.
• You can get comprehensive website traffic information on your site for free - just ask your website provider to install it.
• Most of your website traffic comes from search engines. A little time (or money) spent "promoting" your site to the search engines can be well worth it.

Real Estate websites have become a big thing on the east end. I did a rough count and found over 130 real estate website locations for the Hamptons and the North Fork. HREO.com (Hamptons Real Estate Online) hosts most of these site locations, with Hamptons.com (Hamptons Online) gaining fast. The parent company of East End Extra, Office Management Systems Corp., and www.i-2000.com also provide websites to East End Real Estate agencies.

What Results Does Your Real Estate Agency Get from HREO.com or Hamptons.com?

There are many reasons real estate agencies ought to shop around before picking a website supplier - or think of changing the website supplier.

If you have a real estate site hosted by HREO or Hamptons.com, chances are most of your traffic comes from your host - and most of the traffic which goes to your host, some of which comes to you, comes from Search Engines.

Just because your site is hosted on HREO or Hamptons.com, that doesn't mean that someone who clicks on your host will go there and in turn go to your site. Once at your host, the prospective buyer has many choices - only one of those choices is your site.

If you have a site, you don't care how much traffic the host, HREO or Hamptons.com gets. You want to know how much comes to your site - and could you get more traffic with another host.

If you promote your site independently and get your website appearing up high in the search engine results, when a prospective buyer clicks on your link, they will go right to you. They do not see the competitive listings.

Our research indicates that the total traffic HREO and Hamptons.com get is about the same.

But, where does the traffic go once it gets to this site, and how does it get to you? And what factors determine how much traffic gets to your site??

How Much Traffic Does Your Site Get?

The Real Estate agency owner should insist that your website supplier install a traffic measuring service or software. Such services are free, and without them you are flying blind. (Hamptons.com profides such software -- HREO.com doesn't.)

The site measurement service we use on our websites is SiteMeter.com. The data reported is factual and useful, but an unscrupulous provider can generate false traffic, which will make you think you are getting more "hits" on your site than you are.

Here is an example of the type of daily statistics I get on one of the sites we manage:

-- Site Summary ---

VISITS
Total	261
Average per Day	14
Average Visit Length	2:40
Last Hour	1
Today	5
This Week	107
PAGE VIEWS
Total	410
Average per Day	22
Average per Visit	1.6
Last Hour	2
Today	2
This Week	167

An important report from SiteMeter.com tells you where each site visit came from, i.e. whether the lead comes from HREO.com Home Page, or from the Hamptons.com Real Estate Page - or directly from a specific search engine like www.yahoo.com or www.excite.com.

Real Estate agencies which place their website address (e.g. www.dunemere.com) in their newspaper and magazine print ads get hits directly from their ads - the site counter service will separate those out for you.

Search Engines Should Work for You!!

Traffic to most Real Estate websites comes primarily from Search Engines, because prospective buyers use search engines to find Real Estate.

Putting ourselves in the place of a prospective buyer of real estate on the East End, we searched for the words "Hamptons Real Estate", "Southampton Real Estate", "Water Mill Real Estate" …etc. in eight different search engines.

What Were the Search Engine Results - HREO.com and Hamptons.com?

The websites that came up most - within the top 20 listed websites among a very long list of websites - were definitely www.HREO.com and www.Hamptons.com. (Hamptons Real Estate Online and Hamptons Online)

Individual broker websites like www.prudentialhamptons.com, www.dunemere.com, www.bluebayrealty.com or www.hamptoncountry.com are also found in the searches, because these real estate firms have been promoted to the search engines.

How do you promote your own website to the Search Engines? Call us, we'll "talk" you through how to do it.

In our research, however, none of these individual real estate firms were even close to the search engine rankings - and therefore traffic -- of the two leading multiple real estate agency sites, HREO.com and Hamptons.com.

Conclusion: Prospective buyers that use search engines will find, and click on, and go to HREO.com or Hamptons.com - more than any other website.

However, individual real estate agencies, which do a good job of promoting their sites to Search Engines, can quite possibly get more traffic from the Search Engines than they get through their host.

CLICK HERE TO SEE THE RESULTS OF THE SEARCH ENGINE STUDY, 11 LOCATIONS, 8 SEARCH ENGINES

Traffic to HREO.com is first divided into two parts.

1. Section of the site containing all of the listings of all the HREO.com clients interspersed. In this section of HREO.com, when a prospective buyer searches for houses in Sag Harbor, with three beds and two baths, the search results will contain houses put on the website from a number of the HREO.com clients who have Sag Harbor listings, 3 beds, 2 baths. Agencies like Cook Pony and Prudential do better here by the sheer numbers of their listings.
   
   
2. Pages showing "click on" icons (links) of almost ninety Real Estate Agency locations. The agency with the most inviting "click on" icon does best vs their competition on this section of the HREO.com site.

When a prospective buyer reaches Hamptons.com the Real Estate Page, he sees only about 20 logos of Real Estate agencies to chose from.

In the case of Hamptons.com, the traffic is divided between twenty (not close to 90) real estate agency locations. Hamptons.com does not have a site which contains all the listings of all their clients - as does HREO.com. Hamptons.com has only pages which contain the "click on" Icons of Hamptons.com's twenty client Real Estate agency locations.

With less than one-forth the choices for the prospective buyer to make, agencies who advertise on Hamptons.com will average over four times the hits when compared to HREO.com.

On the Hamptons.com site, The agency with the most inviting "click on" icon does best vs their competition.

Banner Baloney

HREO.com brags about their banners. Banners, in the context of this article, are advertising (ads) on the top and bottom of search results pages of search engines. Go to www.Yahoo.com and some other search engines, search for "Hamptons Real Estate" and at the top of the results page you see an HREO advertisement - click on the HREO ad and you go to HREO.com home page.

However, if the prospective real estate buyer searches for other criteria, such as "East Hampton Real Estate" or "Water Mill Real Estate" on www.Yahoo.com - No HREO banner appears on the search results page.

The HREO banner coverage is only partial within the search engines where they place banners. And HREO does not pay for the placement of banners in all important search engines.

We have not found any banners advertising Hamptons.com.

Banners may help increase traffic - but just a little bit - not enough to make up for the traffic per real estate customer disadvantage HREO.com has when compared to Hamptons.com.

Research has shown that prospective buyers who use search engines usually don't click on banners. Banners might increase HREO.com hits by ten to twenty percent.

But Hamptons.com gets on the order of four times as much traffic for the average one of their customer locations when compared to HREO.

This is simply because Hamptons.com has one fourth as many customers and the same average traffic from search engines as does HREO.com. Divide the same traffic into 1/4th the pieces and each piece is four times as big.

The URL Name Advantage

An advantage of Hamptons.com is their name (in internet jargon, called a "URL"), "Hamptons.com". "Hamptons.com" is an intuitive name. Prospective buyers might, on their own, think to type in that name into the "Location" or "Address" blanks of Internet Explorer or into Netscape. No one would intuitively think to type in "HREO.com".

Hamptons.com has it's own following and traffic because it is one of the two most popular Internet Site Providers (ISP) on the East End of Long Island. People come to Hamptons.com for many other subjects than just Real Estate - while there, they might click on Real Estate.

Pricing:

Not only is Hamptons.com more efficient from a traffic and leads standpoint but Hamptons.com is much less expensive than HREO.com.

HREO prices are all over the lot for the same service - "what the traffic will bear". For fear of losing an account, we've seen HREO give away their service for as long as one year - free for a year to keep the customer from leaving HREO to go to the competition.

Hamptons.com charges about $150 per month for a single office location website. (And that's on the high side of what you will pay in other US markets.)

In one of the East End markets, we found customers at HREO.com paying anywhere from $400 to $1,200 per month for the same single office location website service. One pays about $400, another pays about $800, and a third pays $1,200.

With HREO.com you pay a lot more and get a lot less.

Except for the "Get it For Free" customers on HREO.com, HREO.com is more expensive than Hamptons.com.

But if you are on the web to get leads, you don't get your money's worth at HREO. Even for free - you're better off at Hamptons.com where you will get many more leads per month.

Quality of Service Considerations:

Service with HREO is poor. We've heard many complaints from HREO customers about HREO service.

• HREO picks up photos only once a week -- and after picking them up, they often take another one to two weeks to get the photos on the site.
• The procedure you use to input the data into the HREO site is cumbersome and time consuming.
• The HREO site is full of duplications - the same property can be presented by more than one agency. HREO has no provision for the identification or prevention of duplications.
• HREO gives you no help in taking a listing off the Internet once it is no longer on the market. Lots of properties on HREO have been off the market for months - even years!
• If you want to add an email address for a new agent in your agency, it often takes weeks for HREO to get it for you.
• We've heard many complaints from HREO website clients that the Email sent through HREO to the client agents gets delayed - often for days, or weeks - and even lost.

Hamptons.com service is good.

• Pictures can be added to the site quickly.
• Keyboarded input to the site is efficient.
• If you want an email address for a new agent, do it over the phone in minutes.
• Email with Hamptons.com is efficient, doesn't get delayed or lost.
• Hamptons.com doesn't have a community site. Duplication is not an issue.

Use Appraise@ Listings Editor to Manage Your Website

With Hamptons.com, if your listing system is Appraise@, your listing system and your website are all one. When you add a listing, it can also be added to the website without having to re-type the entire information. Just type in a description, title, select photos, and mark the listing "internet active" -- on the same program. The rest of the listing facts will automatically on the website. If you edit something - say a price change - on a listing (whether it be sale, rent, or land) the change also applies to the same listing on the internet site.

Once a day, the website is updated - automatically - reflecting what you did on your Appraise@ listing editing program.

With the Appraise@ system, transfer data (RTS or Suffolk Research) is used to automatically take sold real estate and vacant land off the website.

Without this automatic feature, lots of listings stay on a website that have been sold.

If HREO.com Is So Bad, Why Do They Have So Much Business?

This article has produced a strong indictment against HREO.com. Why then do they have so much business if the service, traffic, and pricing is inferior??

Two reasons we believe:

One, the Real Estate community in the Hamptons is a clubby - do what the other guy does, without thinking - place. HREO.com was first to push websites in the Hamptons - they got an early lead. "If Cook Pony and Schneider do it, I want to do it".

Two, The guy who runs HREO.com is a super salesman. He hounds you until you sign up. If you want to leave his ranks, he hounds you to stay - even gives you six months or a year free to stay.

We Want Your Feedback!!

Disagree with what I have said here? Have something to say that I didn't say? Write me, we'll let your words be heard.

George R. Simpson

Click here to see
George R. Simpson's Resume

________________________________________

Mail to info@hamptonslistings.com with questions or comments.
Copyright © Office Management Systems Corp., 2000, Hampton Bays, NY. All rights reserved, 425 County Road 39A, Suite 203, Southampton, NY 11968, Phone: 631-204-0207, Fax: 631-204-0257, Beeper: 631-633-9370

Previous on
East End Extra:

East End Icons -- Dec 2000

 

How to See HREO.com and Hamptons.com on the Internet:

1. Double click on the icon for "Internet Explorer" or "Netscape Communicator" icons.

2. In Internet Explorer, at the top of the screen, after the word "Address", type in www.HREO.com or www.Hamptons.com - then depress the "Enter" key on the keyboard.

In Netscape Communicator, at the top of the screen, after the word "Location", type in www.HREO.com or www.Hamptons.com - then depress the "Enter" key on the keyboard.

(To get to individual Real Estate agency websites just type in the website address or location -- like www.hamptonhomes.com, or www.dunemere.com, or www.allanschneider.com.

3. Once on either site, simply click on areas - the clicking action will take you to other pages of the site.

Note: HREO.com is entirely a Real Estate site. Hamptons.com is a community site for the East End of Long Island. Once on the Hamptons.com site, you must click on the word "Real Estate" at the top of the page to get to the Real Estate section.

What's a Search Engine?

When in Internet Explorer or Netscape Communicator (called "Browsers"), instead of typing in a "location" or "address", you click on the button marked "Search".

You are then presented with a selection of "Search Engines". Say you select (click on) the search engine www.Excite.com.

On the site www.Excite.com, you are presented with a blank space in which you type your search criteria, i.e.: Hamptons Real Estate or Southampton Real Estate or Southold Home Rentals.

Then you click the button that says "Search" or "Go", and the "Search Engine" does its thing and finds many websites which meet the selection criteria you typed in.