Huntington Beach CA real estate listings and homes for sale, home buying, home selling information

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California Coastal properties expert reports on:

How today’s buyers are finding their next home

Curt Chivers with the CHIVERS Coastal Properties Group of RE/MAX Select One in Huntington Beach provides some useful information about the best way to reach today’s buyers.

Home sellers and their listing agents are currently facing a strong “Buyer’s Market” with too few buyers for all the available homes for sale. Serious and qualified buyers are like gold – rare, valuable, and in very high demand. Knowing how and where these buyers are searching and finding their next home purchase is very valuable information to both home sellers and real estate professionals. Home sellers need this information to make sure they select a broker and agent that have the capability, resources, and technology commitment to reach buyers in the correct medium. Listing brokers and agents need this information to know where they will get the greatest return for their marketing expenditures to achieve the highest quality result for the seller – usually defined as a closed sale at the highest price possible in the shortest time possible.

According to 2007 research statistics from the National Association of Realtors here is such information:

Approximately 80% of all home buyers started their search process on the internet. This number was 40% just a few years ago.
Approximately 30% of home buyers purchased a home they found online first. This number is steadily increasing year to year.
Only about 5% of homebuyers purchased a home they found in the newspaper first. This number is steadily decreasing year to year.
About 35% of home buyers purchased a home first shown to them by a Realtor.

For home buyers the internet provides multiple hi-res photos that can be zoomed-in, printed or downloaded, generous amounts of detailed information, custom search capabilities, aerial photos, mapping, school information, neighborhood data, and much more. The newspaper typically provides one small poor quality photo per property and a few words of text. It is not surprising to see how powerful the internet has become in real estate advertising when you compare what the consumer experiences ~ internet vs. newspaper or a quality magazine.

What is the best real estate company web site

for today’s home buyers?

This needs a multi-part answer. First of all, home buyers need to know about the site. This takes “branding” and millions of repeat “impressions” in the marketplace so that buyers will know about, and try the site. Secondly, the site needs to have a very high amount of content such as all the listings, mapping, school info, etc. Buyers will leave very quickly and not return if there is low content. Additionally the site needs to have very high “stickiness” so the buyer has quick and easy success and will stay on the site and repeatedly return. Stickiness is measured by how many mouse clicks per visit the buyer does once in the site.

It is a good bet that the site with consistently the highest traffic as measured by actual unique (new) visits, return visits, and high stickiness is probably the best site as voted by actual home buyer use.

According to the on-going real-time web site traffic measurement done by Alexa.com remax.com is, by far, the #1 visited real estate company web site. Below are the stats of the winner after comparing nine major real estate companies serving Orange County and Huntington Beach.

RE/MAX dominates in web traffic

Remax.com receives approximately 2.7 million unique visits per month ~ by far the most visited real estate company website.
Remax.com has high content: over 5.2 Million listings, custom searching, mapping, neighborhood facts, property valuations, and more.
Remax.com is very “sticky” with average clicks per visitor of 14 and a very high return visitor count.
Remax.com is the most comprehensive real estate organization website and is very user friendly.
Since March 2006 remax.com has connected RE/MAX agents to over 4 million visiting buyer’s who requested that a RE/MAX Realtor help them tour a home they found on remax.com. Currently remax.com generates about 6,400 such buyer leads to RE/MAX agents per day.
RE/MAX is the most highly recognized real estate organization brand in the world with it’s famous red, white, and blue balloon and familiar tag lines: “Above the Crowds!” and “Outstanding Agents. Outstanding Results”.
RE/MAX is the largest real estate company in the world with approximately 115,000 agents in 7,000 offices in 65 countries. RE/MAX agents currently average 13 years of real estate experience. Each of these agents is promoting remax.com and helping their clients relocate all over the world using the RE/MAX on-line referral network to other RE/MAX agents.

RE/MAX recognized very early on that the internet would surpass color print advertising as the consumer preferred method for home searching and selection and has invested heavily on remax.com, a property search system for buyers, for many years. RE/MAX spends approximately $60 million annually on promoting and developing remax.com alone and spends about $1.2 Billion per year system wide on all forms of advertising, including TV commercials, newspaper and magazine ads, direct mail, and other media that are continually driving more traffic to remax.com. The net result is that RE/MAX agents have the most buyers, the most sellers, the most past clients, and the most sign calls, etc.

The game has changed. The vast majority of today’s home buyers are starting their search on the internet, selecting their favorite properties, printing them out, contacting an agent to arrange tours, and mapping their route on the internet too. By far, more of these buyers are going to remax.com than any other real estate company web site.

Joanne Chivers had this to say about the Chivers Coastal Properties Group: “We are a team of Realtors dedicated to the success of our clients based on the principles of achieving the client’s best possible result through the use of competency, truth, and skill. We believe that the highest quality marketing, services, and skills combine to achieve the highest quality results. Our team members are all dedicated full time Real Estate Professionals with a minimum of 7 years experience and an average of 15.5 years of Huntington Beach residential real estate experience who share our principles. We will ALWAYS put our client’s interests first. This is the only way we want to be successful in the real estate services business. Our client’s overall satisfaction is everything to us.”

Curt and Joanne Chivers are Realtors with RE/MAX Select One in Huntington Beach. They have approximately 26 years of combined experience in high-end Huntington Beach residential real estate. Curt & Joanne may be contacted by cellular at: (714) 713-3030 or (714) 231-2016 respectively, or by email at: chivers@usa.net, or visit their website at: www.HuntingtonSeacliff.com.