JACKSONVILLE, Fla., Oct. 4, 2016 — Home ASAP, the leading provider of online marketing solutions for real estate professionals, announced that over 14,000 U.S. based real estate agents and brokers have signed up for the company’s Search Alliance™ lead-gen co-op network, including over 4,000 agents in the last 50 days.
Search Alliance™ is a first-of-its-kind marketing solution designed to help agents attract consumer home search web traffic to their individual websites. The past decade has seen the rise of major national portal sites, which currently dominate this space. Search Alliance™ allows agents serving any market and any brand to link their websites into the Search Alliance™ network, effectively creating their own national home search platform for consumers.
Home ASAP began testing Search Alliance™ in March 2016 by invitation. The company opened its solution to a wider audience, including agents from its 470,000+member Real Estate Agent Directory on Facebook, on August 1st.
“I believe our incredible growth rate clearly illustrates the pent-up frustration many agents have with the portals,” said John Marshall, COO and CFO of Home ASAP. “They’ve been asking for a solution like this for a long time, and we invested in creating a truly innovative platform. Since first unveiling Search Alliance™, we’ve seen a strong stream of referral traffic, as agents share the platform with their peers. By the nature of its design, the more agents who use it, the more effective it becomes for all of them, collectively.”
Search Alliance™ provides a solution for three critical problems faced by agents when competing with portals for online consumers. These include:
- Inferior websites that do not provide the same high level of user experience as the portals
- Geographically-limited property search, that is constrained within the boundaries of the agents’ local MLSs
- Inability to compete with the marketing firepower of the national portals
Search Alliance™ solves these issues by first providing participating agents with a free, state-of-the-art IDX Home Search website that rivals the portal sites feature-per-feature. Agents then link their websites into the Search Alliance™ network, providing a national home search experience with no geographical limitations. Agents can drive traffic to their own websites and capture leads for free. They can also participate in the co-operative marketing program to receive network-generated traffic using an auction-style bidding system. Similar to Google AdWords or Facebook Ads, Agents can control the price they pay for network-generated traffic. The Search Alliance™ network leverages the collective marketing power of thousands of individual agents to compete against the branding efforts of the portals. Home ASAP’s IDX Home Search technology has won praise from agents and industry trade experts, as well as from consumers, who indicated their preference for the property search 80% of the time over the leading national portal in Home ASAP’s internal side-by-side tests.
“We’re processing new agents as quickly as we can, every day, and it is not slowing down,” said Marshall. “Our growth validates the transformative nature of our platform and the notion that agents would be willing to work together to regain control of online consumer home search and free themselves from becoming prisoners to the portals.”
Home ASAP is the leading provider of online marketing solutions for real estate professionals, offering a broad portfolio of integrated applications and services to help connect home buyers and sellers with agents and brokers. The company’s flagship products include the Real Estate Agent Directory™, the #1 place on Facebook to learn about and connect with over 470,000+ real estate agents; IDX Home Search™, an innovative home search technology for agent websites integrated with Facebook business pages; and Search Alliance™, an agent-powered co-operative marketing network. Home ASAP also provides agents social media services for networking, advertising, marketing, content management, referrals, and lead capture, under the brand names: Page Engage™, Dream Sweeps™, and TurnKey Suite™. For more information, visit HomeASAP.com.
