“Come in Houston – we have a problem”

by Peter Toner on August 23, 2010 · 3 comments

I wrote last week how my local MLS consumer print outs sucked.

In the article one of the commenters pointed out that HAR – The Houston Association of Realtors have a great reputation in the industry for innovation so I went over and checked out their consumer facing portal at HAR.com.

har3 300x256 Come in Houston we have a problem

So I headed over and clicked on find a home.

The home search functions were a bit clunky but I'll skip that part and head straight to a consumer display to see how that stacks up.

Here's a typical property listing sheet from the HAR site with our observations and suggestions.

(I'm guessing I'm not going to be very popular in Houston)

Location is important – if you can map it please don't make me click
No kidding, why bother to explain…
Share brings up Facebooks share function (shown below) pity it doesn't actually describe the home
Print flyer pulls up a different display (shown below) with a huge flaw
Neighborhood in this case pulled up an empty page (shown below)
Price reduction info but when? How long is the total market time?
Can you show me more than 1 photo at a time please?
This belongs below the listing so there is more room to play with for photos and map

The print flyer function offers two choices:

Either a preformatted "flyer" with just photos the main description and the agents details (actually not enough info to be meaningful).

Or the web version which I have shown here.

Only the street # and street are displayed on the page – not the town or zip This is a HUGE flaw.

Again the listing agent info belongs further down (where it is anyway) and there are not enough images or a map.

Here is the popup from the "Share on Facebook" link – this time the address is shown in full – but does not tell me anything about the home that would make many want to click over to find out more.

Here is the dead end for this properties neighborhood info

Personally I didn't expect to find so many problems so quickly. They are all easily fixable but IMHO these flyers and linked information have not been designed with the consumer in mind.

So what do you think? Am I being too harsh?

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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }

RW August 25, 2010 at 2:42 pm

Well, yes, you are being too harsh. Not to say there couldn’t be improvements, but it seems you didn’t take the time to see some of the features that are there.

1.      Location – there is a interactive map near the bottom of the page if you scroll down.
2.      This is a consumer site, not the agent site, my friend…
3.      No comment
4.      The city and zip are listed farther down in the detail section. Most homes in Houston are in the city of Houston anyway
5.      This is an anomaly based on this listing. Not many are like that.
6.      If you click it… it will show you the original price, and when reduced.
7.      If you click ‘gallery’, it will show you ALL the pictures at once
8.      OK…

There’s a LOT more functionality than meets the eye.

Best regards

Peter Toner August 25, 2010 at 3:03 pm: @Ray – thanks for taking the time to add your comments. My critique came from a consumers perspective – I honestly believe they want the info in a logical well presented format – I don’t think they want to scroll or keep clicking to find stuff that should logically be visible.

BTW – You cut and pasted from Word – so I just stripped out all the “rubbish”

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