Survey Results: The Web Rules for House Hunting
The results of a recent survey commissioned by Prudential Fox & Roach REALTORS® confirm conventional wisdom: the Web is the dominate tool of choice for house hunters.
We all know that the number of online and mobile resources for real estate search have proliferated in recent years but it takes consumers time to change their habits and adopt new technology. It appears that Web resources are now firmly embedded as the primary way for people to search for residential real estate—in fact more than 80% of respondents reported using online tools.
In a story written by the Philadelphia Inquirer about the survey, they point out that the number one online resource for real estate search were property portals and noted that “The big three among these sites were Realtor.com (64 percent), Zillow (61 percent), and Trulia (51 percent).”
We are of course pleased that the top sites all leverage Maponics location datasets to enhance search capability and provide local geographic context for areas such as neighborhood, school and ZIP Code Boundaries. Visit our customer use case pages to read about how one of these companies uses our data.
And this summer, we will begin offering a first-of-its kind dataset containing subdivision boundaries across major metro areas. Read more about Subdivision Boundaries.
From our Subdivision Boundaries announcement:
In suburban settings, the smallest defined area around properties is typically the subdivision—which can include everything from a few homes within a gated community to a development with hundreds of properties. The real estate industry has long recognized that the immediate area surrounding properties significantly impacts quality of life and home values.
In the Inquirer article, they also note that driving through neighborhoods is still a common house hunting practice, although people now use online resources to winnow the list of properties they visit—saving money and precious time. The good news here is that in addition to using our data to enhance their web sites, many of our customers also embed our data in their mobile apps to provide enhanced location context for home buyers on the go.
For more ideas about how mobile real estate apps could add cool new features based on Maponics geofences, check out this article on Directions Magazine.
