Ever search for a word but can’t seem to find it? Or try to recall a fact that won’t roll off the tip of your tongue?

Ever need to buy a vowel from Vanna White?

What’s missing from the online real estate experience?

As part of a brand analysis for an East Coast brokerage, I drilled 10 pages deep into Google’s results for "real estate" in the company’s market area. I explored every result. There were 100 Web sites in total. Of these 100 sites:

  • 51 belonged to either associations, media companies, builders, funeral homes (not kidding), or listings aggregators;
  • 37 belonged to individual agents, teams or single brokers;
  • 7 belonged to brokerage companies;
  • 3 were ActiveRain blogs;
  • 1 site was a listing blog with an RSS feed;
  • 1 site was a Naymz profile.

While I learned a bit about search-engine positioning, this exercise revealed something far more concerning: the X that marks the spot where real estate Web sites, in general, fail.

Promises, promises

Several things crystallized.

1) The most obvious was the mechanical gunfire of platitudes rat-tat-tatting across every broker and agent Web site. The bullet holes murdered my ability to decipher and choose. It’s like the old game show, "To Tell the Truth." Will the real local expert, market specialist, top producer, #1 expert please stand up?

Web 2.0 is a failure if you allow yourselves to believe it is. Web 2.0 is a failure if the only thing you value is the short-term lead and disregard the long-term benefits of creating a heightened user experience and conveyance of your brand position.

I visited 100 Web sites. Save for the ActiveRain profiles, there was nary a trace of anything Web 2.0. Seems to me, there’s an opportunity just waiting to happen for one agent, one broker, one voice to cut through with something different.

Marc Davison is a partner at 1000watt Consulting. He can be reached at marc@1000wattconsulting.com.

***

What’s your opinion? Send your Letter to the Editor to opinion@inman.com.

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