Charlottesville Virginia Real Estate

I’m trying something new with my blog today. I’m writing a sponsored post. I’ll talk more about what that is in a followup post, but I wanted to disclose that I was paid by a third party to review a real estate site for my readers. The topic (Realty1st.net) is given to me, but the opinions, good or bad are my own. So here goes… I don’t need a realtor in Atlanta, so what I am going to review is the website. Is it functional and usable? Is it credible? Does it satisfy the needs of its intended audience?

About Realty1st.net

Realty1st is an Atlanta Real Estate Site sponsored by Mark Teytel and Lena Zaretsky, Atlanta realtors for over 15 years. The site is very comprehensive (more than 100 pages), and includes details about the realtors, testimonials, current MLS home listings (sortable by city or searchable by the typical criteria), real estate articles, a real estate term glossary and a current real estate news section.

My Reaction

The site is pretty and well laid out; Navigation is simple and intuitive. The site has everything you would need and expect from a professional realtor’s site and then some. I am a huge proponent of testimonials for any sort of sales and they are featured prominently in the top navbar. The home searches are obviously a must and they are easy to find and use. I like that you can opt out of the contact info gathering page (generated when an anonymous users searches listings) by clicking “Search now; Remind me to sign in later.” I enter bogus info anyway when I’m required to provide it if I’m not ready to be contacted by someone, so it saves them from dealing with sales leads named “Just Looking”.

The site has a flash header and, though I’m generally opposed to using flash on a site other than as a last resort, this site uses it tastefully, and it isn’t overdone (and there’s no click to activate… that drives me nuts). Realty1st.net seems to have been “SEOed” well, with lots of juicy keywords sprinkled on the main page and throughout the articles. In fact, I suspect that the articles and the glossary are there only to get some additional long tail search engine traffic. I don’t feel like they distract from the site or make it less usable, so they are probably good things. I think that Realty1st is a solid offering and is generally a good resource for Atlanta real estate.

A couple things felt off about the site to me though. I was overwhelmed by the amount of text on the front page (about 1000 words… FYI this post has 1500 words so I think I might be the one who needs to learn restraint)… and it reads like it wasn’t written for humans. In high school, I used to play a game with a friend of mine during essay exams where we would take turns writing a random word on the other’s page. We would have to find a way to incorporate that word into the text as naturally as possible. So for example, I’d be writing some response to Crime and Punishment, and would have to find a way to work the phrase “midget penguins” in on the next line. It made essay writing a lot more interesting and it was fun to think about people grading the papers and seeing these awkwardly inserted phrases from out of nowhere. The first couple paragraphs at Realty1st.net felt kind of like one of those old essays, with certain real estate keywords feeling forced into place. It seems like they are targeting too many phrases:

• Atlanta Georgia Real Estate Market
• Top performing Atlanta Real Estate Agents
• Reliable Atlanta Real Estate Services
• Atlanta Real Estate Agents
• Atlanta Real Estate Brokers and Agents
• Atlanta Real Estate Market
• Atlanta Real Estate Brokers and Agents
• Atlanta Area Realty Market
• Atlanta Area Realtors

Those were all found in the first third of the page. And though many phrases are used in sentences, they are capitalized in title case. I can appreciate the desire to rank well for competitive keywords, but it should never, in my opinion, be at the expense of readability. I get the impression that the copy was written by the technical search engine people (who know how to think like a search engine bot) rather than by the realtors (who clearly know how to sell).

Quality Indicators

The site looks professional and generally leads you to trust Realty1st. The design looks professional and functions cleanly in all the browsers I tried. Using A librarian’s guide to determining a website’s credibility, Realty.net is pretty good. Teytel and Zaretsky are credible and experienced; the photo and the blurb on the site convince me of that. Realty1st.net as a site is available and fast; there are no broken links and the site “looks” professional. My big complaint is with the readability of the text, discussed below in proofreading notes. Per the credibility list:

At LII we’re very skeptical of web sites with more than a couple of typographical or grammatical errors. In addition to how poorly it would reflect on us to point someone to a grammatically challenged web site, it’s a big hint that the content on the site is generally not up to snuff.

Proofreading Notes

It seems that parts of the text, particularly in the last 2/3 of the main page, need to edited. There are fragmented sentences and a number of prepositions and commas are missing. This paragraph, for example:

Another huge land investor Wayne Mason is proposing a $600 million mixed-use redevelopment near Gwinnett Place building eighth-largest shopping center. 25-story high-rise residential towers, as well as other planned mixed-use developments in the area will be erected.

I would phrase that as:

Land investor Wayne Mason proposes redeveloping a $600 million mixed-use complex near Gwinnett Place to include:

• the nation’s eighth-largest shopping center
• twin 25-story high-rise residential towers
• a number of other mixed-use developments

I wouldn’t call my text perfect, but I’ve eliminated the impassive tense, and made it quicker to read. I would further recommend that the entire “Atlanta Fast Facts” section be a graphic or offset in some way rather than be front page, in-line text. It’s just not very important. In the opening line: “…our team of professionals dedicate all their time” ought to read either “dedicates all its time” or “our professionals dedicate all their time”.

All of the capitalization notes mentioned above in the bulleted keyword list affect my trust as well. Real estate isn’t a proper noun and should only be capitalized when used in a title. I think that it is possible that some people might visit the page and be turned off by its lack of readability and awkward sentences. Mark or Lena should copy the text into Word and make it their voice. That would be a great example of the $5000 hour principle. It may be that they cut a couple paragraphs or change the order around… it should sound like it’s them speaking though.

Recommendations

A final thing I would mention about the site is that it feels like a finished work. There are two categories of websites in my mind. Those that are always changing, and those that are a finished work. After I’ve been to a finished work, I generally don’t go back unless there is a tool there that I need to use again (like the listing search). Sites that are always changing, when producing quality content, keep me coming back regularly and tend to solidify that brand in my mind. That piece is missing from the Realty1st site. If I come back in a year, I would expect the site to be exactly the same, only with different listings, different syndicated news and perhaps updated sales figures from the prior year.

A winning site should establish a relationship with me, the potential customer. The obvious solution is to start a blog. There would be new content everytime I checked, written in a way that would cause me to trust the realtors while getting to know them as people. The problem with the blog is that it takes time and commitment. A finished work is preferable to a blog that was started but not maintained. I suspect Mark and Lena are not interested in that level of commitment right now. A better solution would be to have a weekly or monthly real estate article that people could subscribe to. They could even continue to have them ghost-written. It would signal to visitors that the site continues to grow and be built so it would be worth checking back sometime.

Conclusion

So to summarize and conclude, Realty1st.net is a fine and functional resource for people looking for homes in the Atlanta area. I suspect it will get some leads from people trying to find a realtor using a search engine. I think there is some work to be done to correct potential credibility issues surrounding the text. Furthermore, allowing people to subscribe to something will increase the value of those visitors to the site and encourage them to come back.

P.S. I got a kick out of this “as-is” 3 BR listing (not a realty1st listing). I was just playing around learning to use the site and found this gem. It looks fine until the slideshow gets to all the interior pics. It’s one thing to not replace carpet or to leave the walls an ugly color, but they didn’t even pick the trash up off the floor. I’m pretty sure that goes against some staging best practice or something; see “Preparing your home through the eyes of a buyer“)

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