The Technology Powering Millions Of Home Searches In 2022
If you are the proud owner of a real estate business and you run a website for your service, you should look into internet data exchange as soon as possible. This exciting modern technology is the perfect tool for you and your business, as it can help you to generate a thorough and up-to-date home listing database, bring in more leads and improve your real estate business’ image and efficiency for customers. If you want to learn more about this innovative and highly useful technology that is making waves in the online real estate world, read on. It could make all the difference to your home-selling company’s success.
The Technology: Definitions and Uses
This will be a simple guide to understanding what Showcase IDX is and how it can be used to improve your real estate company’s website and maximize its efficiency. Essentially, Showcase is a plugin for WordPress websites and is designed to improve a real estate company’s lead generation, brand, and marketing. Showcase is an internet data exchange tool that is used by multiple listing service databases to collate data about homes for sale from different companies and display them all in one easy-to-manage location. To understand this concept fully, you should ensure you understand all of the terminology, such as WordPress, multiple listing services, and internet data exchange. These terms will be explained below.
What is WordPress?
You might be surprised to learn if you are not familiar with the name, that WordPress powers nearly a third of the world’s websites. WordPress is a free and open-source content management system used by millions of companies globally, big and small. It provides useful tools for everyone from personal bloggers to large corporations and is a powerful site builder and content management system. The WordPress platform is flexible, scalable, and free to use, which makes it super accessible.
WordPress aims to make it attainable and as straightforward as possible for anyone to create an online presence in minutes. It is the preferred platform for a long list of household names such as Sony Music, Variety, Time, Inc., and the Disney Company, along with millions of smaller businesses and personal websites.
What is a Multiple Listing Service?
A multiple listing service (or an MLS) is a database established by several collaborating real estate brokers to provide in-depth and current data about properties for sale. A multiple listing service allows brokers to see one another’s listings of properties for sale, and brokers can work together by consolidating and sharing information to get the best possible outcome. When a sale is made this way, the collaborating brokers can share their commission.
All of the brokers involved in the MLS add their houses for sale to the book or electronic database which is created for the multiple listing service and keep it regularly updated. The participating companies distribute the book or database in print or online to each member of the service. This is the idea behind internet data exchange.
What is Internet Data Exchange?
Websites that display listings, such as real estate websites, use a technology that is designed for companies to share data with other companies. This is a mutually beneficial system as every company that partakes can generate the most up-to-date and thorough listings, as explained above. Internet Data Exchange (also known as IDX), is the manner by which multiple listing services share listing data among members. As the idea behind internet data exchange is the trade of listings between different sites, IDX is also sometimes known as “Broker Reciprocity”.
Why You Should Subscribe to Showcase IDX
First of all, Showcase is a highly popular internet data exchange service and comes out top rated in Made in America’s 2021 report on home search features. This is due to the brilliant service it provides real estate agents and the pleasurable browsing experience for potential home buyers. Customers love to browse with Showcase as it is designed to be mobile-friendly. Rather than squashing all of the information and graphics down to the size of a phone screen, Showcase can format the website layout to make it similar to a mobile application.
On top of this, this tool is a dream for real estate agents to use and add to their websites easily. The Showcase team can help you seamlessly implement the internet data exchange search feature and any consumer engagement tools you would like to incorporate into your overall design without fundamentally changing the entire aesthetic and layout of your website.
Showcase offers a wide range of exciting and innovative features that you can capitalize on, such as a powerful CSS (centralized showing service), which is an appointment scheduling system that real estate agents use to arrange home showings for their interested clients. On top of this, Showcase uses page wrapper tools, layout templates, and many other features that make it the most customizable internet data exchange website plugin. For more information on the benefits and features of Showcase, check out the examples below.
Lead Generation
If you ask a handful of real estate agents what the main purpose of their website is, the majority will say the same thing. The purpose of their website is to generate leads. If this is your goal as well, you need to consider what it is that prospective homebuyers want. An effective lead generation campaign will rely on content that gives its target audience what they came to see. In the context of a real estate agent’s website, potential buyers and sellers go online to look for home listings. Buyers will want to peruse the available options, while sellers might want to look at the competition, how the prices are looking and what is selling. Moreover, sellers often follow up the sale by buying a new property.
So, to appeal to your target audience and thus generate leads, you need an accessible, well-managed, and enticing home listings section on your website. This is what an internet data exchange feed on your real estate website will do: generate leads.
Lead Capture
Showcase uses powerful lead capture tools to hold onto potential buyers once they have reached your website. Browsers will be prompted to contact sellers, arrange viewings, look at other listings with similar features, and generally be enticed to follow up on home listings they engage with. These tactics are great for retaining a customer’s interest and encouraging them to explore the site further and the available homes in their area.
These lead capture tools can also be referred to as calls to action. They encourage browsers to take affirmative action and move forward in the process of finding a home to buy. However, they need to be clever and effective. You do not want to simply tell customers to give you their contact information, instead, you want to promise that they will get something in return. You can let potential home buyers know the advantages of registering, such as valuable communication providing them with listing updates, complete access to listings, the ability to save favorites, and so on. This leads us to another benefit of Showcase; marketing.
Marketing
Showcase, the easy-to-use WordPress plugin, can turn your real estate website into a living platform, using clever marketing tools. For instance, it can automatically send drip emails to clients with new listings, based on what they have previously searched for. Moreover, it can continually update detailed listing pages and hot sheets, which are reports produced regularly by multiple listing services of any recent activity, such as price changes.
Another great marketing tool offered by Showcase is the customer relationship management (CRM) platform. This is a piece of software that can be used to manage interactions with customers, store information about their searches, and automate a number of responses to customers’ browsing actions through marketing and sales funnels. For example, it can generate social media posts on a schedule or customize communications to make them personal to the customer.
The showcase also offers real estate brokers the chance to join an active community of other agents and experts, and from this community, they can learn strategies and actionable tips in things like personal branding, marketing, SEO, social media uses, and more.
Search Engine Optimization
SEO, or search engine optimization, is the process of improving the quality and quantity of traffic to a website or a web page from search engines. Showcase is the only WordPress internet data exchange plugin that uses server prerendering. That is a technical term meaning Google sees listings and hot sheet content as yours. Showcase’s clients see more traffic from Google than any other internet data exchange service.
Other Great Features of Showcase
The state of the art mapping tools used by Showcase allows customers to search for homes with a fully-integrated map search feature and get lightning-fast results. What’s more, prospective house buyers can search through home listings with their friends and family with Showcase’s social searching feature. This is something like a social media platform and it allows potential buyers to share listings with their loved ones, who can then reply by leaving a comment, react to the listing with an emoji, share the listing on other social media platforms, and help the buyer to decide how to proceed. Finally, Showcase offers affordable subscription plans that fit your needs as a real estate agent.
To Conclude
Showcase IDX is an internet data exchange service that allows real estate agents to collaborate and share their data on available listings to form a multiple listing database that is regularly updated, thorough, and up to date. This database allows real estate agents to provide their customers with a top quality service and all of the relevant information needed and expected by prospective buyers. It is a mutually beneficial system for all real estate agents involved, as well as for the buyers, as the agents can ensure they are providing the best service possible, and reaping the financial rewards for it, while customers have the widest and most in-depth listings available to them so they can make an informed choice. Internet data exchange with Showcase is a win-win!
Moreover, Showcase offers a wide range of innovative features and benefits for both the agents and the buyers. These benefits include seamless implementation of the tool into your existing website and a centralized showing service which is ideal for real estate agents who want to schedule appointments quickly and easily, without overlap or confusion and other issues that can come down to human error.
The slick look and straightforward-to-use style of Showcase will generate traffic to your real estate website. Lead generation is another massive bonus of this tool for your business. Once leads have found your website, they will be enticed to stay and further explore the listings and website features with Showcase’s lead capture features. These include suggestions to contact sellers and automatically generated emails with relevant information to their home search history.
The marketing features provided by Showcase, such as these automated follow-up emails, are an excellent way for you to grow your company. The showcase also uses customer relationship management to store data about prospective buyers and target marketing campaigns, such as social media posts, to their specific needs. On top of these automated marketing tools, Showcase offers agents, brokers, and other experts to join an active online community where they can share ideas, marketing tips, strategies, and information. This is a wonderful way for real estate agents to help one another grow and stay relevant and informed.
These are just some of the great features and positive elements of Showcase IDX, and for more information, you can visit their website. Showcase, as shown above, is a popular and loved internet data exchange service that has generated positive reviews and satisfied customers with glowing testimonies. If this guide has inspired you to look into the many benefits of internet data exchange then you should reach out to the Showcase team today to discuss how their service can improve your real estate website and your customers’ experience of your service.