Optimizing for the Home Buying Cycle: The Research Stage

Home shoppers can spend months on multiple websites as they transition through the four Home-Buyer Life Cycle Stages of Discovery, Research, Selection, and Closing. In our Optimizing the Home Buying Cycle series, we uncover all the ways to align your website to the needs of each of these four stages in order to deliver a consistently optimized and impressively effective home shopping experience.

Last week, we went over some great ways to optimize your site for home shoppers who are casually looking at their next home's possibilities. While we saw some fun, effective strategies to help draw in the Discovery crowds, as home shoppers transition into the Research stage of their Home Buying Cycle their questions, interests, and demands become more specific, critical, prominent, and stressful. To align, your website should be equipped with granular and informative content that answer the questions most critical in the Research stage while still remaining user friendly and engaging.

One of the major tools we discussed for the Discovery phase is the Automated Valuation Model, an estimation tool that helps potential home sellers discover the worth of their home. On the opposite site of the spectrum, in the Research phase, home shoppers become much more concerned with the investment they are about to make than the potential worth of their current home. To help put their questions and stress to rest, offer them Home Sales Trends and Transactions, a frequently updated data set complete with local housing trends and market information.