In exactly one week, the European Union's new data laws go into effect. Here's what REW clients need to know...

What is GDPR?

GDPR is the acronym for General Data Protection Regulation, which is a series of laws that will go into effect in one week, on May 25, 2018.

GDPR tackles 7 different principles of data collection and protection, a few of which apply directly to real estate sites:

1. Principles relating to the processing of personal data
2. Lawfulness of processing
3. Conditions for consent

Simply put, GDPR wants to ensure that businesses are collecting personal data in a way that is accurate, ethical and responsible, and that personal data is kept safe and confidential at all times.

What are the rules of GDPR?

Until legal

We recently hired a third-party research company to interview anonymous buyers and sellers who bought or sold property, worth between $300,000 to $1.5 Million, within the past 12 months. The participants were asked a series of questions over an hour-long interview to help us better understand their habits, opinions, and decision-making processes.

We were particularly interested in finding out how buyers and sellers choose their real estate agents in this digital age. Here's what we found out:

People don't choose Realtors on portal sites

One of the most interesting observations in the market research results was that buyers and sellers are actively using portal websites to explore properties, but they don't use those same portals to find real

To help our clients provide better experiences to their buyers and sellers, we hired a third party research company to talk to people who have bought or sold a home within the past 12 months. This company asked a series of questions in an hour-long interview and the results were fascinating.

In this blog, we'll review some of the most interesting things about mobile websites and apps that buyers and sellers had to say.

Quick overview of the findings

• Most buyers and sellers don't want to view real estate agent websites on their mobile devices
  
  
• The most common complaint is screens that are too small to view detailed listings or photos, and a lack of mobile responsiveness
  
  
• Those who do use mobile preferred to use apps over websites

We recently hired an independent market research company to interview 10 random people who have bought or sold a home worth at least $300,000 in the past 12 months, and ask them a series of questions over the course of an hour.

When asked to describe the best real estate websites they have seen, guess what they said?

Nothing.

Most respondents didn't have any awesome sites to share because nothing stood out to them. The few that did comment on a website referenced the major portals, including Zillow and Realtor.com.

This means there's huge opportunity for real estate agents, brokers, and franchises to make an impression in their local markets. All they have to do is create the best website visitors have ever seen, and we're here to help:

The

Right on schedule, REW's first release of the spring is ready to go! This release includes the official launch of our branded REW IDX Apps, new improvements to the REW CRM platform, and optimization improvements to Vision. Let's talk about all three...

REW IDX Apps

Over the past several months we've been focused on responding to client feature requests and optimizing the build process to launch personalized, branded apps faster. Our mobile team has streamlined the tasks required to build highly functioning apps, allowing our clients to have a personalized, branded app that shows off their company.

REW IDX Apps focus on the most important aspect of the real estate buying journey: searching for homes. Data automatically connects with the REW CRM,

Towards the end of 2017, we surveyed close to 300 real estate agents across North America, checking in with nearly 200 of those Realtors to find out where they plan to spend their marketing budgets in 2018.

We broke the agents into three cohorts based on GCI:

• GCI under $100,000
• GCI between $100 - $300,000
• GCI above $300,000

Then we asked them whether they intend to spend less, the same, or more in several areas of marketing to figure out where their investments were going to go. Here's what we discovered:

Web Platform Spending

At least one in four Realtors plan to spend more on their web platform in the 12 months following the survey. In contrast, only 1 in 10 Realtors intends to spend less. That means the vast majority of

What are sitelinks?

Sitelinks are the smaller links that sometimes display below a site's primary link in the search results. Sitelinks are most likely to appear when someone searches for a specific company name or domain, offering quick links to the pages of the site Google thinks a user is most likely to be interested in.

What is the benefit of sitelinks?

The biggest benefit of sitelinks is the amount of visual real estate they take up on the search engine results page (SERP). We've seen anywhere from 4 to 10 sitelinks, which represents a large portion of the overall results page. Studies have shown that when a user is presented with sitelinks, their odds of clicking through to the site increase.

How do I get sitelinks?

Sitelinks

We recently interviewed 300 active real estate agents across North America to learn more about how they conduct their business and drive success. But we wanted to take it a step further and also talk to buyers and sellers to get a stronger understanding of what they're looking for in an agent.

By understanding the mindset of buyers and sellers, real estate agents are able to better serve their clients and develop marketing solutions that will be more effective in converting leads into clients, and clients into happy referrers.

We conducted in-depth interviews with 10 randomly-selected people who had either bought or sold a home between $300,000 and $1.5 Million within the past year. These interviews took approximately an hour each and focused on

We hired an independent market research company to survey 300 active real estate agents across the United States and Canada. These agents were asked questions on a wide variety of topics, including their marketing and spending habits.

In this blog, we'll walk through the spend results and reveal the intriguing insights we saw about top-performing real estate agents. (Hint: if you think they spend differently, you're right!)

First, let's take a look at what the average agent actually makes in a year:

We simplified the categories so we could better analyze their marketing and spend habits, and observe behaviour trends that emerged within different levels of success. These were the three GCI groups we reviewed:

• under $100,000
• between

That's right, today is Real Estate Webmasters' fourteenth birthday! 

It has been yet another amazing year here at REW and, as I sit here on a plane bound for the T3 Summit, I have time to reflect on just how far we have come. More importantly, I get to feel the excitement of what I know is yet to come in our future!

Here are some of the highlights:

In the past year:

• Launched the industry's first 360 photo / video-enabled virtual reality website
• Launched REW Leads iOS and Android full platform
• Signed and launched #1 Team according to REAL Trends
• Largest RFP - 150 pages
• Largest Enterprise Customer - 10,000 users
• Largest Project - 25,000 development hours (I believe this to be the largest undertaking for a single project by any