How often do you use your own website or app?

I don’t mean how many times you visit your site. You probably do that all the time. No, I mean, how often do you USE it the way it’s meant to be used – to find a home. How often do you search on the site, rather than just going through MLS? Do you have saved searches set up? Do you get email alerts.

That’s one of the reasons I think that real estate brokers should be forced to move every five years – because it compels you to use your own technology the way a client does. You have to sample the product! If you owned a hotel, wouldn’t you stay there once in a while as a guest? If you owned a restaurant, wouldn’t you put on some Groucho Marx glasses-and-moustache as a disguise to eat a meal? And wouldn’t that look odd if you were, say, a woman?

So shouldn’t you go buy and sell your house every couple of years using the same tools that you provide your clients?

Okay, maybe you don’t have to actually buy or sell something. That could get sort of expensive. But you should do more than just an occasional click-through to see what the property detail page looks like. And you need to do more than just hire some firm to do a website usability study. You need to do it yourself.

It’s amazing what you’ll learn. In the past year, I went through the process of buying a home, vowing that I would not “cheat” and go into the back-end of the MLS to get information. I wanted to experience the real estate industry, and particularly my own website, as a client.

And it was my website developer’s worst nightmare, because I kept finding limitations on our site that annoyed me as a user – stuff that I never would have discovered if just by clicking around “testing” the site, and probably stuff that “professional users” might not have uncovered. After my cascade of emails and memos, my developer is not speaking to me anymore, and I honestly don’t blame him. Frankly, most people in my company don’t speak to me.

To be fair, I also used the portals as a comparison, and found that they often had the same irritating limitations. For example, no one gives me enough good sold data. As a broker, I know that we have lots of historical limitations on providing sold data to users, because blah blah blah we are gatekeepers IDX VOW blah blah blah.

But as a home buyer, that stuff is gold. I’m trying to figure out whether a listing is well-priced, which means I need to know how the pricing compares to homes that have sold. But the only comparison I can generally make is to homes that are still for sale – which by definition have NOT sold. Those are not helpful. I need the homes that actually sold, not the ones that failed.

Put it this way – we are the one sales industry that has comprehensive comparable sales data. You can’t get that when you buy a car. You can’t get that when you buy a 4k hdtv. But you can get it when you buy a house.

Except you can’t. At least not on most sites or apps. Some of them have it, but it’s never fully complete, accurate, or easily accessible.

Similarly, I can never find out what’s going on with listings that aren’t on the market anymore. I save a property. A week later, it’s no longer active. But from my perspective, it’s just “gone.” So what happened? Maybe it’s under contract. Maybe it terminated. Maybe it expired. Maybe it fell into a sink hole. Who knows? IT’S AN UNFATHOMABLE MYSTERY.

And those are just examples. The point is – what we think buyers actually want might be different from what buyers actually want. And you will never know that until you use your site the way your clients have to.

So go on your site. Pretend to be a buyer. Do buyer stuff.

Just be prepared that your web developer will come to hate you.

Editor’s Note: This was originally published on Inman Media on September 22, 2015 as “Realtyperson, Heal Thyself: Use Your Website Like a Buyer.”