How Buyers Search for Real Estate Online

To capture real estate buyers, you must think like a real estate buyer. What do buyer want most? Well, it's going to depend on what type of buyer you're dealing with. It's best to target all in different ways with different pages or landing sites on your website.

First Time Buyers

First time buyers are not sure what to do. They may start to search for "real estate" in general and quickly learn that it opens to broad of a field. But in doing this they may come across popular sites like Realtor.com Homes.com and some of the other big dogs like Trulia, Yahoo and Zillow. From there they can check into homes and find an agent but most likely they are going to find the listing agent, not a buyers agent and we all know how that can go down.

Sometimes you will get the lone buyer that will search for "First time buyer in .... whatever town" but that's pretty rare. Many buyers may search a phrase they have heard from the media such as buyers incentives or cash back at closing. The biggest was the tax credit first time home buyers got a couple years ago, but that time is passed and you need to keep up with the changing lingo.

Most first time buyers will search for homes since they are typically looking for exactly that; a home. Not a house, or property or investment means, but a home. Somewhere they can call their own and start a family. If you are in a large city try suburbs or communities around the area and use titles and phrases such as Battle Ground homes or Riverfront homes in Vancouver. You can add the state abbreviation if there are other cities of similar names that may be bigger.

Second Time buyers or beyond

Those that have bought and sold before typically know a little more of the playing field and may be searching for an actual agent rather then homes. They know that a buyers agent will work for free for them and to let them do all the work and show them the houses. But this is also a mixed bag because those that are selling and buying at the same time may want an agent or Realtor that really knows both. They may want to look for homes on their own and use the basic terms such as Fairbanks real estate or Enterprise AL real estate agent.  These buyers will want experience and knowledge of not only their current area but the one they are moving to.

Real Estate Investors

Real estate investors are those that know what they want and how they want it. They are either looking at simple homes to rent out or multi-plexes to invest in.  These buyers are probably looking for an investment Realtor or foreclosures homes in which cases you can use terms like "Auction" "Foreclosure" "REO" " HUD Homes" and "Short Sales". You may want to create a page on your site such as this: "Santa Fe short sales"

Buyers look for different things at different times. The trick is knowing when to post, how to post and what to write about. Write for your audience, optimize to be found and capture that lead.