Making IDX snippets more valuable to consumers (feedback requested)

[Morgan]

Search engine spiderable IDX snippets are AWESOME!

They are great for SEO, and drive conversions by placing targeted listings on the pages that have the most relevant information on them.

The current version of the snippets is great - it has the listings, price links, and some helpful stats.

There was one thing that has always bugged me, though - and that is, while the circle graph is beautiful (especially when it has lots of property types in it) it’s not particularly useful in a lot of city-based pages since it’s almost always filled with just one property type.

So I thought about what I would want to see there instead (something that would still have great visual appeal but also be a bit more useful for consumers (and agents as they are talking to consumers)

Here’s what I’ve come up with so far with the help of @matthutchings @Moriah @ralfpinheiro @hongda.zhang Aman and the rest of my super secret non official R & D group.

What you’ll notice first of course is the graph - it’s now a timeline based graph with average sales price for that property criteria (helpful, right?)

As we were building this, I put my consumer hat on and realized that not all the properties were “exactly” what I was trying to get an average (at least not with the default settings) so we coded it so that it has a lot more filters right in the snippet ,allowing agents and consumers to adjust the properties they are evaluating.

We also took it upon ourselves to provide several graph data options so that customers could consume the data in different ways, and we allow them to set custom timelines to compare.

And finally I wanted to show off a little “subtle” but creative flair, so I added in a colour change on the graph so if the market (or that dataset) has gone up in value, you can instantly know as the graph with be green, and if it’s down, it it red

I still have a few things I want to do (such as have the titles dynamically update to show the current query, and implement on click updates to allow for more fields to be filled out before the snippet changes) - but I’m pretty happy with he direction so far.

What do you tihnk - is this a valuable change / improvement to the IDX snippets in your opinion?

Would you add anything to this idea?

[Morgan]

Looking at some other sites - one thing I noticed we could consider adding is additional sort options (example Zillow)

We currently have newest and oldest, highest and lowest - most beds, baths, sq ft and lot size do make sense to me. Anything else you would sort by? Maybe price per sq ft?

Homes has price reduced date (I would call this “recently reduced”) as well as open house (@FernandoOrtiz this would go well with your new open house application

[FernandoOrtiz]

@Morgan

(@FernandoOrtiz this would go well with your new open house application

I love it! We can definitely explore sorting listings by open house, I’ll add it to our requirements

[matthutchings]

This has been a great project to work on and love what we have done so far and where we are going!

Two additional ideas we have discussed are:

1. Integrating AI (Rewpert) into these statistics to help provide the user with a summary of what this information says about the market and how it can help encourage a buyer/seller have the right conversations with their agent.
2. Integrate CMA functionality into the listings, giving the user the ability to select listings that more closely reflect their property and provide more accurate insight into the current value of their home.

Both are great ideas we are exploring, any preference which we give priority to currently?

[Morgan]

@matthutchings

Both are great ideas we are exploring, any preference which we give priority to currently?

That’s a great question! Both are a bit bigger in scope and still need some discovery, but I’d also pose that question to our customers.

Here’s a mockup of my AI idea for all the artificial intelligence fans out there.

There would be a button or CTA on the snippet that says Ask AI for advice or soomething - then it would pop out REWPert

Like so: (I’m including a basic prompt for example purposes, but the button would actually do this “behind the scenes” and the prompt would be far more sophisticated)

Once the prompt runs (in the background) - our AI REWPert would give actionable feedback/advice (and be completely interactive just like ChatGPT 5 but built into the website) but always in the background the prompt would “add” - incentives to have the consumer reach out directly to their assigned agent to give more specific advice

My thinking is that if you give a “build in” GPT experience right in the page you will engage consumers for a lot longer (time on site is a good thing) and also have more opportunities to build trust and engage with them.

Of course you would need to be signed in to use the full AI toolset, so it would be a lead capture mechanism as well.

Future state (crazy long term view) you could even have REWPert tracking their listing history and start popping up and recommending additional homes they might be interested in etc.

So I do like the novelty of AI built in and I think our customers AND our “customers customers” would actually use it too! The downside - OpenAI charges for use and so it consumes credits (costs money) and the more it is used, the more it costs - it’s not a big deal in terms of cost (it’s super small per query) but thousands of users per month would add up to $10’s or even hundreds of dollars.

[Morgan]

The other idea which we are building right now (but need to prioritize where to take it) is the select and action idea in snippets (and search results)

The idea (base) is pretty simple - if you’re logged in, you can take certain actions against multiple properties (CMA is the best example or even just side by side comparison)

So let’s say you select a few properties (example below)

Once you’ve selected a few properties (3, 5, 10 whatever) you would then have an action menu - and that action menu would like you do several things.

Most basic “Compare side by side” - click that and it opens a modal and just shows you all the properties you selected side by side in a grid.

A more advanced form of that would show +/- (in green or red) in terms of above or below the average or something (or as compared to your own property) < this is where we go next and get SELLER leads!

One button would be “compare to my home” - how are we going to do that if your home is not in the list? (EXACTLY!) - you would first need to give us your home details - fill out as much as you want (the more details the better) even upload photos if you like,

Now we can store your home and you can compare it to many different properties whenever you want (it is editable in the consumer dashboard)

Make it extra killer? Ensure you capture all there financial details (current debt on property, monthly mortgage payments, interest rate etc - and why would they want to do that? Becaus you have a homebot style equity tracker which they can view online any time and you’ll email them updates daily, weekly, monthly - etc

See where I’m going with this?

I think of the two - the one I want more is the 2nd one (though it’s more complex) - as I feel it would be a super helpful client education tool when you’re on listing appointments - but I’m curious what other customers think as well.

[ralfpinheiro]

Very cool that we are incrementing such a useful frontend module of our framework!

Two things I love about this new feature from a design perspective: the ability to provide users with valuable and informative visual information with a simple click by toggling the graph, and its variable color that changes depending on whether the market is up or down. The latter is so simple, yet at the same time so effective.

[ralfpinheiro]

The AI integration that allows interaction with the data provided by the graph is also very interesting. I wonder how much more we could do to further enhance the user experience.

[KDemski]

Great ideas. Agreed, the circle is pretty but not useful. Also, google is really liking graphs atm so could boost organic seo. I assume that’s part of the plan? How would this look on mobile? Adding a coming soon module might also be beneficial for authority.

[Morgan]

@KDemski

google is really liking graphs atm so could boost organic seo. I assume that’s part of the plan?

Yup
@ralfpinheiro on how it looks on mobile - thoughts?

[ralfpinheiro]

That’s a great question, especially considering the limited space available on mobile devices!

One of the main principles we’ll use is responsive design, where the interface naturally adapts to the window size (e.g., mobile or tablet screens). That being said, I believe we could reduce clutter by removing unnecessary gridlines and labels from the line chart (e.g., abbreviating labels and number values).

Another potential approach we could explore is giving users the option to load different graph types, such as bar charts, to help determine the best visual representation for mobile.