Should You Require Contact Information to Search Listings on Your Web Site?

If you do searches and visit the sites of your real estate competitors, how many are requiring registration? It's fewer every day, as the internet is quite competitive, with even a one-person-show having the ability to present a professional web presence at low expense. You can't dismiss smaller companies because they can't afford massive print advertising.

Your competition is every brokerage and every agent in your area. If even a small percentage of them are providing listings search without registration, they'll get the huge percentage of visitors.

It's human nature to resent unwanted pressure, and the internet real estate buyer or seller has the expectation of "free and comprehensive information" when it comes to the web. Even if competition allows you to force registration, will that prospect appreciate your site or view the privacy intrusion as a negative first impression?

There are real estate agents that have tried it both ways. Most will say that not requiring registration caused a drop in their web prospects. It's probable that this is a very true statement, and that going back to requiring sign-up increased the number of prospects in their database.

The problem is that most of these sites had no other effective method of capturing contact information. Thus, when forced sign-up ceased, so did prospect generation. The most successful commission-generating sites out there do not require it and have other more friendly offerings to entice visitors to provide their information.

Get out of your real estate agent shoes and into the shoes of a buyer or seller prospect. You are thinking of a real estate transaction sometime in the future and want to do some preliminary research.

You might be six months to even a couple of years away from buying or selling, but you really want to get an idea of what's ahead in this very large financial transaction. So you go to the web, where you always find all the information you want on just about every product that you buy. It's a fairly large city, and your search on "yourtown real estate" turns up a huge number of web sites. As you check them out, some require sign-up to look at listings and some do not. At this stage, you're not really ready to divulge your identity just to get some basic information, so you try a few "no registration" listing searches on different sites.

One or more sites seem to stand out with a lot of free and detailed information about real estate in the area. Over a few months you get closer to buying or listing, and then you want to get more detailed information in your research. One site offers statistics and other detailed reports via email registration. This site has been one you've visited over the last months and found quite helpful, so you sign up for a few reports. You get what you expected and it's helpful. Over the next month or so you get a few emails with more detailed information and links to helpful resources.

Whose client is this going to be?