After a night of investigating some new website stuff, a new spam filter for the blog, some interesting new prospects for playing flash video, an overall assessment of website performance… I got to thinking about a common thread in many different real estate blogs. Articles with titles like:
- Big Changes at Zillow.com – Are they becoming a national MLS? – from the Ubertor Blog
- Google Implements Local Search Results – from Future of Real Estate Marketing
I got to wondering WHY MLS.ca seems to have lost in real estate searches to Google and others. So I did a little looking around, I went over to MLS.ca do do a little checking. Now I realize real estate agents do not use MLS.ca to do searches, and that may be why nothing has been done about it. Here are a few of the website atrocities I noticed:
- Load time from the time I typed “mls.ca” into my browser, until the time I had relevant search results for properties in the Kitsilano area of Vancouver was an astounding 40 seconds. As a reference, I typed “Kitsilano Real Estate” into google and was presented 109,000 search results in less than 1 second.
- Ease of use Count them, 5 maps I had to click on!
- The British Columbia portion of a map of Canada.
- Then click on “Vancouver – Lower Mainland” on a map of BC.
- Next (when it loaded), I got to choose “Greater Vancouver”, I thought “Great! finally the area I want!”.
- Wrong! Assuming that I am immigrating to Vancouver from say, Toronto (some say escaping rather than immigrating) I needed to determine if Kitsilano is in VW, VE, BU or RI.
- That aside, after choosing VW, I finally get to choose between KT, FA, AR or gag me now…
I feel sorry I had to write all that. You probably didn’t read this far! I wouldn’t.
So Why did I have to click on 5 maps, then select my property search criteria just to see listings!
Before someone points out the “Advanced Search” page on MLS.ca would have been quicker, I will try to recall the the last time I clicked on the advanced search link in google. Never! Why? Because I don’t have to.
It is not too late, some basic site redesign, speed enhancements and a proper marketing effort could save MLS.ca. The call for change might have to come from the people who don’t use it, the Real Estate Agents.