More leads, more transactions and more customers ready to buy. Those are the basic findings of one of the first major surveys gauging how conducting traditional real estate business online is working for both agents and clients.
Coldwell Banker Real Estate Corp., which introduced Coldwell Banker Online two years ago and launched an updated site in February, found that in four months, the Web site generated 17,500 customer leads to its sales network, 10 percent of them resulting in actual transactions.
In addition, and perhaps more significantly, the survey found that giving customers the freedom to browse online listings and contact agents via e-mail early in the search process “allowed the relationship to commence at a more advanced level once they are ready to see houses together.”
The survey also found that the Web site provided more exposure for sellers without increasing costs.
“Coldwell Banker was the first national real estate brand to create a Web site and the only brand, thus far, to have 90 to 100 percent of its inventory online at any given time,” said Alex Perriello, the company’s president and chief executive officer. “Our investment in Coldwell Banker Online is paying off because the Web site delivers what we knew was the single most important factor to the home buying and selling public–easier access to real estate information.”
Coldwell Banker Online posts almost 100 percent of the company’s 160,000 listings in the United States and Canada. The site attracts more than 2.5 million hits weekly and between 80,000 to 100,000 user sessions weekly, lasting an average of 19 minutes per user, according to the company.
Coldwell Banker, a subsidiary of Parsippany, N.J., giant HFS Inc., has more than 2,600 offices in North America, with new franchises planned to open in Thailand, Singapore and Malaysia.
Credit report crunch
In the wake of a technical glitch in an overloaded server brought down Experian’s low-key launch of its online credit report service, the firm is still being flooded with e-mail asking for the online reports.
Consumers, hungry for the information, didn’t seem to be fazed by the problem, which caused eight people to get credit reports other than their own.
When Experian found out about the problem, the company quickly shut down the service and contacted the customers who had gotten the incorrect reports.
Experian activated the service Aug. 13, without the usual drumroll and fanfare that accompanies a service that is going to attract a great deal of attention.
Experian used encrypted communications to allow consumers to buy and receive their credit reports online for a fee.
Although the service had been under development for a year and tested for the hundreds of requests a day that the company expected, nobody expected the deluge of requests that happened after a story about the new service unexpectedly appeared in the Washington Post.
What was to have been a quiet shakedown cruise turned into a sail through a hurricane, as the system logged thousands of requests within just a few hours after the paper hit doorsteps. Of the 2,000 requests, hundreds of credit reports were sold and delivered and eight were misdirected, according to the company.
The problem, company officials emphasize, was not with the Internet or Internet security or the security of their site. The problem happened in a computer behind a firewall that carries requests to and from the giant credit database.
The wave of requests “created great congestion and some reports were sent out of sequence,” said Don De Pamphilis, Experians’s vice president for electric commerce.
“This is not a big problem” technically, said one industry observer familiar with the company. “A switch in the server allowed (data) to be tracked out on the wrong line. I’m surprised they didn’t have a fail-safe on the delivery end, like asking for a Social Security number or password before the report was delivered.”
Embarrassed company officials quickly pulled the plug when they found out about the misdirected reports, and said it wouldn’t be online again until the problem is fixed and the system can handle the demand. No date has been set for the relaunch.
“We hadn’t expected the publicity or the demand,” said Rufus Lusk, Experian’s director of industry. “We were totally overwhelmed. We hadn’t built a spigot big enough. We figured we’d get a few hundred. We received thousands of requests.”
Company officials said they are upset that the confidentially of a consumer may have inadvertently been violated.
“Privacy is a core value for us,” he said. “This was our worst nightmare.”
Lusk said all the people who paid to receive credit reports in that period will get refunds, even if they received the correct report.
The systems “will not go back online until it is tested and tested and tested,” he said. “We have to balance demand with privacy protections.”
Even if some untrustworthy soul received someone else’s credit report, he or she couldn’t do much with the credit card account numbers, De Pamphilis said.
“The information in online credit report contains truncated account numbers. The information is of no use to anybody but you.”
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Chicago Tribune Homes
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