Century21.CA Roles Out A Real Estate Portal Master Piece

Wheretolive.com and Century21.CA Roles Out A Real Estate Portal Master Piece at Inman Connect New York 2008.

BrokerIPTV  : Well, hi Roald Marth, president and  co-founder of the WhereToLive.com. We are here at New York Inman Connect 2008.   I understand we are rolling on a brand new really Web 2.0 progressive, even and Web 3.0, Google search map, can you tell us a little bit about it? 

Roald Marth : Well it is Canada, in fact it is all of Canada. century21.ca is WhereToLive’s new version 4 product that we delivered for Canada. This company has nearly 6,000 agents and 400 offices and it is a big country. It is geographically large, on the internet it is very small. It is one site with the latest AJAX mapping technology and with 21 photos on many properties a consumer can look at what is for sale, from century21 in Canada.
 

BrokerIPTV : Well, I heard Brad Inman speak the other day about transparency and the market and the video, I know it is incorporated a blog into the site, where do you see blogs going as for as relativeness in real estate sites in the future?
 

Roald Marth: No, we actually have over 6,000 blogs on this website, because this website century21.ca is the main corporate site for century21Canada, but in additional that we also have launched simultaneously 400 of our company sites, approximately 400 company sites and approximate 6,000 agents sites. Now, each one of those levels of sites has a blog on it and essentially ones case they have taken their marketing budget, which was formally and it is in the millions dedicate to the television and they have appointed Don the president yesterday shifted about 95% of that money now on to the internet. We are not getting all that money, which we where, but it is using to market the website as well, but these 6,000 blogs, where every single agent can become an local expert on the internet and their theme in Canada is the "local experts" and so we took that theme and we create a blog. Content, we got directory contact, you can find it in agent, we have also got property contain of course before sale and solds.This particular site is not video yet, but it will have video. Don Lawby the president talked talk here at Inman that “video" is coming, we have the plan for it, what we are focus on right now is simply getting photos.” We have a five years strategic plan and we are taking one step at a time, we are now about a year and half into this project and as we say in Canada project and we will continue to roll this out, in fact just tomorrow morning I will get out an airplane and fly up to Canada to joined Don. He and myself in some other seminars and other people and other seminars, we will be going to approximately 30 different cities, explaining to the agents and to the brokers how to use this product, how to leverage it. In a few months we will become with a French for Quebec, because Quebec is not built into this right now and that is big big initiative, the bilingual aspect of this website. So we have lot of blogs. 

BrokerIPTV : Excellent, and lot of the people we have talked to here, what seems to be rising to the top is in the new part of the web being found and Brad Inamn talked like I said about video, transparency, social networking in the market. I mean, what is the real estate role to role mark, where do you see the future of real estate web sites, brokerage business, is it same in Canada or different in Canada and then US or this is something that is that universal approach that all brokers going to have to look at it? 

Roald Marth: Well, it is the same in many respects and it is also different in respects in Canada. In Canada it is a different size markets a 100,000 agents total in the entire country of which century21 has about 6,000 of those agents. So, the scale of it is smaller, the economy is also different. The Canadian real estate economy is very good, it is a resource based economy in Canada. They do not have sub-prime mass people still put money down on deals up there. So the real estate economy is very very solid. I would say that there are some differences in Canada. We do not have as much IDX. So this is about 90 MLS in Canada and IDX data is not like it is in United States. In Canada there are fewer large brokers, there is many many more smaller brokers and it is more of a franchise driven marketplace with some names you would recognize in the US, like RE/MAX, but other century21 and Coldwell banker, but other names like Suton groups and Royal Lepage, you would not recognizing in the US and then in Canada the term MLS is a registered trade mark, and mls.ca is actually the largest real estate website. The irony of all this however is there is out of per capita basis, that is 33 million Canadians and about 310 million Americans, but in Canada probably due to the weather and the high education levels. The Canadian consumer is actually more internet savvy then the US internet consumer. So, what we have found is there is a higher penetration of broadband, in fact Canada ranks number one in the world in per capita broadband adoption, the United States, I forget the exact stat, but it is probable like 7^th or 8^th, we trail very, per capita now. We are in total more broadband uses in Canada, but it is because of our population, but as the percentage. So Canada, for us, has been just a terrific place to release our brand new product version 4.  The nice thing in their case also it has been launch on established brand, century21 is been in Canada and in the world for about 30 years, and so we immediately had hundreds of thousands of unique visitors per month on this website. Now, we certainly have goals and aspirations to increase that dramatically, but in Canada the market place for internet consumer is about 4 million unique visitors in a month. To compare that to the United States there is about 40 million per month there in play and of course Com Score Media Matrix, tells us where those consumers go. In the US they go number one to realtor.com, number two to move.com, number 3 and 4 and 5 and so on and so forth that we can track that. In Canada there is also Com Score Media Matrix and we can track that as well and so we know exactly where the consumer is going, where they are coming from and of course we have chosen to work with Google maps and is very simple we have a hug Google strategy in Canada. We want all the agents to take our product that we are giving away to them for free, we want them to use it and we want them to take the money that they are going to be saving and spend it on Google. 

So we are training each and every agent in Canada, how to open up a Google AdWords account buy their property addresses, buy their sold addresses, buy their own name on Google and we are doing at the corporate level, in fact we just establish our budgets is significant budget, I am not deliberately to go into what the budget is, but it is very meaningful budget in Canada. We will be starting those adds tomorrow actually for the seminar run on Saturday morning. So, we have got an established brand, century21.ca that brand will live in for me, it will be here long after I am gone on this planet. We have got a user interface that is built on Google, we have got content that has filled with lots and lots of photographs and lots of blog posts and we have then got search engine marketing and search engine optimization is built into the website. So, overall we believe that we will potentially have a Ten X improvement in our overall traffic in the next 12 or 24 months. It is little odd on the internet to predict all this thing exactly, but that is our very tight cohesive strategy that thankfully a gentleman by the name Don Lawby, who spoke here Inman yesterday has launched in he has hired our firm to help him execute this strategy, but it is a very well thought out long term plan. 

BrokerIPTV : Yeah, it just seem fantastic, what is your response been so far for brokers and the public? 

Roald Marth: Well the public, I cannot say other than there has been 88% increases in the average time spent on the site, but remember it was launched late November, so we have the month of December which is mostly holidays, so that is all we really have as far as data. As far as the brokers and the agents I will tell you that the response has been phenomenon. We actually do seminars, where we are getting standing ovations, because the agents know they need to be on the internet. The brokers know they need to be on the internet, but what we have given them is a complete turn key package of the online office with CRM and email and storage and blog entry and we have given them a front side and it is all of course personally branded to each one of those layers, so each agent can of there own RoaldMarth.com and as an examples our agentname.com and each broker can have their name. That is all tied together in this cohesive strategy and all comes together underneath this one brand century21.ca. So, we believe that world wide it is the only comprehensive web strategy that is cradle to grave or head to toe, where it is all the way from each individual agent, all the way up through their brokerage office, through the company, through the franchise and in fact of course in composes the consumer which is the driving force of why we have done all this. We want that consumer to have easy access to information all across
Canada on one easy to use interface and we believe that we deliver that and it has been a long 2 year process. 

BrokerIPTV : Well, you are to be commended is a great product, I have used it and looked at it myself. Thanks a lot of your time on, Roald, congrats. 

Roald Marth: Thanks, Mark.