Real Estate Related June 15, 2009

How is our web traffic doing?

As I’m out in offices on a weekly basis I do get a ton of feedback from agents on what they like and don’t like about Windermere.com.

In the NW we are always compared to John L Scott who also has a great site for searching for homes. After we made some significant changes to Windermere we did see our traffic fall due to the new map search that customers weren’t totally use to. We did say however that this was a work in progress and we would monitor it weekly and make sure we kept tweaking it until traffic began to grow again. I’m happy to say that Windermere’s traffic is doing great in fact with the addition of the new list search tool we have really spiked our traffic in the last few weeks. See the graph below from compete.com showing what we have done in the last 3 months, compared to John L. Scott.

As you can see we have had a 15% increase with unique visits and we will continue to tweak the site to gain even more users.

I do want to point out that as a company you always have to be moving forward. If we had waited to launch a new site that everyone liked we would still be waiting to launch a new site. My point is we will never satisfy everyone,  but we will try to make a tool that the public finds to be useful and easy to navigate. The best indicator to see if we have achieved this is traffic and time spent on our website. Keep the feedback coming as we are always looking for ways to make the site even more user friendly.