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The Technology Partnerships Shaping Real Estate

by Jason Porterfield

Yelp and Realtor.com

Through a recent partnership with the online reviews site Yelp, realtor.com is focusing on bringing more data to agents and consumers. Potential homebuyers who visit realtor.com will soon be able to see reviews for local amenities and businesses in a particular area. They’ll also be able to use “realtor.com Local” to see statistics on home prices, as well as in-depth community data for more than 20,000 cities.

Ryan O’Hara, realtor.com’s CEO, said many data points go into the new program.

“The realtor.com/Yelp integration surfaces important local amenities for consumers and agents alike, from grocery and drug stores to coffee shops, gas stations and local services, like insurance,” O’Hara says. “Agents can leverage this information to enhance their position as a local expert, and further augment the information Yelp provides with their own neighborhood insights.”

Amenities and proximity are particularly important to Millennials, who made up 35 percent of all homebuyers in 2015, according to the 2016 National Association of Realtors Homebuyer and Seller Generational Trends study. Sixty-three percent of Millennial respondents reported that the quality of the neighborhood influenced the decision to purchase.

Tech matters, too. When it comes to finding a home, Millennial homebuyers were the most likely demographic to take advantage of apps and search engines on their mobile devices during their search, even though 87 percent used an agent.

O’Hara says that realtor.com will continue to enhance the platform, as it has with the recent addition of commute times and mortgage calculators. The goal? To help agents add to their own knowledge about the areas they serve. The partnership is not about providing homebuyers with agent ratings; it’s about enhancing the data already offered by realtor.com in a way that supports consumers’ interests and furthers access to neighborhood information.

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