April 4th, 2012

Alain Pinel Realtors Launches Newly Redesigned Website with Onboard Informatics Lifestyle Content

By Jackie Berg, Marketing Manager

Alain Pinel Realtors (APR) has launched their newly redesigned website, apr.com, showcasing many new enhancements including expanded property search capabilities, as well as a modern and sophisticated look.

The site’s expanded property search offers refinement options such as school district search, most recent listings, and keyword search. Also featured are an open house search of all MLS-listed properties in the Bay Area, an international property search which offers the ability to find homes worldwide, and an agent/office search which helps consumers find the right agent and/or office for their needs.

Lifestyle search, provided by Onboard Informatics, helps consumers locate their ideal communities and properties based on type of neighborhood, and proximity to entertainment/dining, the arts, shops/services, transportation, and schools. In coming months, census data will be added to all community information on the newly redesigned site, as well as point of interest data to all maps, using Onboard data as well.

Expanded property detail pages now include school ratings, community information, real-time market statistics, property history, area amenities, and social media sharing tools. Community overviews feature local market statistics, unique photos, custom descriptions, and local area demographics. A full gallery of APR’s past campaigns showcases a collection of the firm’s award winning images and branding. And, a buyer and seller toolbox provides site visitors with mortgage and cost of living calculators, rent vs. buy comparisons, and other helpful tools.

“The rapid pace of innovation at Alain Pinel Realtors continues to pick up speed with the recent introduction of a powerful new version of apr.com. Our new site puts an unprecedented amount of information and resources in the hands of the online consumer,” said Stephen Skinner, APR Vice President of Technology. “The site now includes industry-leading search capabilities including lifestyle search, property keyword search and the ability to search for homes based on school district information. The new apr.com makes a strong statement about our ongoing commitment to provide the best online technology and marketing tools to our consumers and agents.”

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About Alain Pinel Realtors

Alain Pinel Realtors (APR) is the largest privately-owned and independent residential real estate company in California. APR was ranked the sixth largest residential real estate firm in the United States based on its closed sales volume in 2010, and has been consistently ranked in the Top 10 firms in the country. The firm has nearly 1,400 agents in its 32 offices throughout the Bay Area. Celebrating over 20 years in Bay Area real estate, APR was founded in 1990 by CEO and President Paul L. Hulme, and is based in Saratoga, Calif. For more information about APR, please visit our website at apr.com.

About Onboard Informatics

Onboard Informatics connects leaders in the real estate, publishing, and technology industries to data-driven innovations that empower informed decisions, enable human engagement and accelerate business results. We use our expertise in data management as a springboard to bring data to life – creating innovative products that help customers (1) understand what’s happening – in local markets, on the web, with their own listings; (2) talk about it and show it to others; (3) manage their business more effectively and (4) get better business results.

Tags: Alain Pinel Realtors, lifestyle search, new real estate brokerage website.

March 30th, 2012

Injecting emotion into a sale from the get-go

By Jackie Berg, Marketing Manager

The visual image of must-haves for a home looks like this, not a pile of numbers.

Inman columnist David Fletcher of ementoru.com posted a fabulous suggestion to sellers: listen to your clients” emotional needs and put them at the front of your efforts.

“There is only one reason prospects do not want to see a home the second time: they have not seen a home they can picture themselves living in that satisfies their emotional needs – like convenience, safety, fun, pleasure, and pride of ownership.”

He suggests using a “lifestyle checklist” and having the client rank the importance of certain characteristics – a sunset view, near the bus stop, etc. – to ensure you are directing them to places that have the must-haves they will not compromise on. Many times, they become unearthed toward the end of a sale, so why wait?

David Fletcher gets it. We know from the 2011 NAR Profile of Buyers and Sellers that people are compromising on price first. Only 4% compromised on the quality of the neighborhood; 2% compromised on the quality of schools; and 1% compromised on distance from schools. Compare that to the 18% that let price slide to get the things they need to have the pride of ownership that the home search is all about.

A Technology and ‘Pen and Paper’ Hybrid

Using a checklist during the sale to identify must-haves is great, but your website can act as a virtual checklist for a lot of these questions. Not only is this something that can increase efficiencies for the broker and the agent, but it is a response to what today’s buyer is doing: shopping around for at least two weeks on average before contacting an agent. Consider the Internet’s rise in selling houses over the past ten years; 40% of buyers find the home they ultimately purchase online, compared to just 8% in 2001.

David suggests that MLS data is important but can’t provide the most important information you need to make a sale. This is where I have to disagree.

Innovative data in our industry has become more sensitive to buyers’ needs. Our Lifestyle Search Engine incorporates millions of data points to help guide buyers to ideal neighborhoods – and potentially homes within – that meet their needs. Answering quality of life needs and thresholds of importance up front, can save a lot of time and allows buyers to say, “they get it.”

Although the Internet and the agent are the two most important factors for a buyer during the transaction, NAR says “real estate agents are ranked as the most useful resource”  with the local know-how and market understanding that the Internet simply can’t provide.

If your brokerage’s site proves to understand the intuition of their search, they are more likely to look to you as a local resource that will understand which emotional levers to push while you are doing what you do best.

Online Lifestyle Search isn’t just a neat engagement tool; this information consumers are putting in upfront can be passed along to agents so that they can reach back out with listings that fit both their preferences for lifestyle and housing characteristics.

In essence, a lifestyle checklist could be on pen and paper the way David suggests, or it can be a support tool to that up front. And what better way to have a consistent multi-platform experience than to sync your website with your irreplaceable in-person knowledge?

Tags: lifestyle search, real estate apps, real estate search process, real estate technology.

February 9th, 2012

Top hoods within the hottest markets

By Jackie Berg, Marketing Manager

We know that metro areas like Chattanooga, Binghamton, and Peoria are showing strength. But what is it like to actually live in these places?

Last week Inman News (along with content from Onboard Informatics and other data/information providers) looked at strong real estate markets to watch in 2012. Price appreciation/sales, strong job markets, and affordability among other factors churned out ten solid metro areas that are a good bet for buying, selling, and living.

As Lifestyle Search is one of the core pillars of Onboard’s expertise, we’re all for lifting up the hood (pun terribly intended) on these shiny cities to see how the parts work together underneath. Outside of giant metro areas, with stereotypical footprints left in our mind by the Back Bays, Park Slopes, and Castros of the world – it can sometimes be difficult to see the DNA of a community. That’s where Lifestyle Search comes in.

Within the Top Markets to Watch, 2012

View A look inside the top 10 RE Markets to Watch, 2012 in a larger map

Just for fun, I ran Inman’s top 10 metro areas through a handful of our 40 lifestyle attributes:

• Areas with high presence of households with children, low crime, and high GreatSchools scores to find the Best Neighborhood for Families
• Using the density of golf courses, driving ranges, and golf sporting good stores to come up with a Best Golf Neighborhood
• Looking at the highest density of eating and drinking establishments, entertainment, convenience to everyday needs (various retailer density) and more to find the Best Neighborhood for Young Singles
  

In many instances, you’ll see our neighborhood definitions don’t align with how Google defines an area. The invisible boundaries that characterize these places can sometimes wrap around a handful of streets, like the six block area around the Downtown Farmers Market in Des Moines.

One note: our neighborhoods generally cover the urban core of cities and may not represent the entirety of the city’s

Restaurants, bars, shopping, and movie theaters line the Soncy section of Amarillo. Meanwhile, the Route 66 District is smack in between three golf courses/country clubs.

geography. In some cases – specifically Cedar Falls and Bloomington areas for this story – neighborhood-level data was unavailable, so we looked at place-level data instead.

Seeing how millions of data points and demographics play together to spit out aggregate ‘best places’ is wonderful not only for my own selfish navigation of American cities:

• It can help those contemplating a move make the most of their dollar
• It can give relocatees a clear view of their new area
• It can orchestrate results that can answer quality of life, family, and leisure needs – the real benefits of an ideal move

I hope you enjoy exploring the Inman Top 10 and drilling down into the neighborhoods that’ve worked to stabilize those markets.

Let me know if you have any questions about how Lifestyle Search works and the many possibilities for creating amazing UX on your site!

October 20th, 2011

Recent Enhancements to Lifestyle Search

By Colleen Staunton, Product Manager

We have recently made a number of enhancements to our Lifestyle Search Engine. The product has generated a good deal of positive reviews from our clients, including BHG Real Estate, Coldwell Banker, Exit Realty, NY Daily News and Prudential Fox Roach, that have implemented the search engine and from end users who are using the application on client sites. That being said, there are always ways for a product to be improved and these recent enhancements have addressed the needs of our clients.

First, Brokers are now able to submit custom boundaries to the system. Previously, a home buyer could use the Lifestyle Search Engine to search within either a state, county or metro area. Based on their criteria, i.e., “are schools important,” “does the area need to be fun and hip,” etc., the search engine would recommend neighborhoods, zip codes and/or city/towns that matched the criteria. This helped consumers narrow down their search for homes by focusing on those areas.

Some brokerages may have a very specific market coverage that can’t be defined by just a county or metro area. In these cases there was concern in highlighting areas to consumers where the broker did not actually have any listings. Brokers want to highlight their listings and showcase the areas only in their market.

We have now changed this where Brokers can also allow a search only within their market area. The broker no longer needs to worry about having to show neighborhoods, zips or city/towns where they do not have listings. The product works in the same way, but now, only those areas fitting the criteria the user entered will be returned. This ensures a smooth user experience where home buyers can search for local areas and listings on a broker site.

Secondly, we have two smaller enhancements that will help developers as they work with the API. One is the increase in the number of attributes that can be submitted to the system in each request. The maximum has been increased from 10 to 20. The other is the number of results that are returned for each child geography. 10 results within each child geography were previously returned, but developers now have the ability to display up to 20 within each child geography.

We hope that these enhancements will help those clients that are currently using the product. If you would like to discuss these further, please contact our Support team at support@onboardinformatics.com.

September 15th, 2011

Onboard Powers Bloomberg/BusinessWeek’s Best Places to Raise Your Kids 2011

By Stacey Ret, Director of Marketing

Communities that are small, affordable and family-friendly with good public schools, make the list for Best Places to Raise a Family

If you have children, you want the best house in the best neighborhood that your family can afford, and it’s not always about the number of baths in the home – although 2+ bathrooms can certainly help bring peace to your household during teeth-brushing time! You evaluate the schools, the safety of the town, the recreation available to all of you – heck, some of you may even want to know where the closest Trader Joe’s is (or is that just me?).  Luckily, BusinessWeek has evaluated over 5,400 communities nationwide utilizing Onboard’s comprehensive community data and demographics to bring us a list of the best places to raise a family.

This year, they shifted their focus from  large urbanized cities to smaller towns with populations of 50,000 or less.Considerations included: town’s median income relative to their particular state’s median income, school performance, number of schools, crime statistics, cost of living, as well as job growth, air quality, ethnic diversity and access to recreational amenities – all of the qualities you would want in a community for your family.

The cities are listed in alphabetical order, by state, and in the CT/NJ/NY tri-state area (where we are located), the following cities top the list:

Best place to raise kids in Connecticut: Kensington

Nearby city: Hartford
Population: 8,479
Median family income: $90,189
Runner-up: Portland

Best place to raise kids in New Jersey: Ridgefield Park

Nearby city: New York
Population: 10,675
Median family income: $84,544
Runner-up: Bergenfield

Best place to raise kids in New York: West Seneca

Nearby city: Buffalo
Population: 43,575
Median family income: $69,188
Runner-up: Lancaster

To read the full list, click here: http://images.businessweek.com/slideshows/20101214/the-best-places-to-raise-your-kids-2011/slides/33

Tags: Best Places, Clients, community information, data, lifestyle search, neighborhood data, real estate data.

September 13th, 2011

Prudential Fox and Roach, Realtors partners with Onboard Informatics to integrate Lifestyle Search

By Stacey Ret, Director of Marketing

September 9, 2011 – New York, NY. Onboard Informatics, the premier data and technology services provider to top-tier real estate, media, and technology companies, powers Lifestyle Search for Prudential Fox & Roach, Realtors. Lifestyle Search, a dynamic home search tool that helps real estate brands create a unique and comprehensive search experience on their sites, allows consumers to find their “best place to live.”

In a recent survey, conducted by Prudential Fox & Roach, Realtors, 73% of respondents answered “yes” when asked whether lifestyle search would be a valuable tool to home buyers during the home search process. The Lifestyle Search feature, powered by Onboard Informatics, allows visitors to the Prudential Fox & Roach, Realtors website to search for a home in the Greater Philadelphia region, based on neighborhood criteria that is important to them – family friendly, quality of schools, proximity to arts and culture —all prior to searching for a physical home.

“Neighborhood search is a missing link in today’s online home search process and the lifestyle search fills that void. Today’s consumers are used to having a variety of options to find their home and a lifestyle search complements the traditional search perfectly in helping them find their home” says Rajeev Sajja, Vice President Online and Sales Associate Technologies at Prudential Fox & Roach, Realtors.

The Lifestyle Search Engine combines millions of data points with battle-tested analytics to determine the places that best match the user’s input.  Using a sliding scale, consumers rank the importance of the criteria – whether the area is family friendly; fun, hip, and trendy; is convenient for commuting; quality of schools; and nearness to culture activities. The engine finds the best matching neighborhoods and ranks the results, providing the consumer with a targeted list of places that fits their criteria.

“In additional to helping our online consumer, it also helps our sales associates with their buyers and sellers” says Rajeev Sajja.

“According to 2010 NAR’s Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers, only 6% of home buyers are willing to compromise on the quality of the neighborhood during the home buying process, and only 3% on the quality of schools – Lifestyle Search tool meets the evolving needs of the consumers,” stated Marc Siden, CEO, Onboard Informatics. “Consumers know what they want and this tool positions Prudential Fox & Roach, Realtors as a neighborhood expert.”

Tags: lifestyle search, Onboard Informatics, Real Estate.

August 25th, 2011

The Creig Northrop Team, of Long & Foster Chooses Onboard Informatics to power Lifestyle Search Widget and Neighborhood Navigator on their state-of-the-art website, designed by SM Sold

By Stacey Ret, Director of Marketing

Innovative search experience and community pages allows website visitors to find the neighborhoods that best meet their lifestyle needs in Maryland, and surrounding areas

August 25, 2011 – New York, NY. Onboard Informatics, the premier data and technology services provider to top-tier real estate, media, and technology companies, is supplying robust community information through Neighborhood Navigator, as well as Lifestyle Search for The Creig Northrop Team of Long & Foster; the top real estate team in the state of Maryland, and #2 in the United States.  These content solutions were a part of the launch of their new website, www.northropteam.com, designed by the talented real estate marketing agency, SM Sold.

The Lifestyle Search Widget, an innovative home buyer search tool, powered by Onboard Informatics, allows The Creig Northrop Team website visitors to search for a home based on specific criteria that is important to them – excellent schools, family friendliness, a fun & hip area, golfer’s paradise, to name a few – prior to searching for a home in a neighborhood that may not possess the qualities important to them.

“We are aware, now more than ever before, that 90 percent of shoppers start their home search online,” said Creig Northrop, principal of The Creig Northrop Team. “We are the leading real estate resource in the Maryland and Washington, D.C. area and that means staying ahead of the curve and meeting our technology savvy consumers where they are most comfortable. We listened to our customers and what they want is an innovative, five-star website that combines all of the great services we offer.”

Lifestyle Search, paired with Neighborhood Navigator is a perfect marriage of two solutions.  Neighborhood Navigator provides the property detail pages, which feature easy-to-read graphs and charts of community information, including recent home sales data, population demographics, school information, crime data, and nearby establishments, allowing the homebuyer to receive a full picture of the area, all before falling in love with a home.

“We are thrilled that The Creig Northrop Team has chosen to feature Onboard’s industry-leading Lifestyle Search feature and data solutions on its state-of-the-art website,” states Marc Siden, CEO, Onboard Informatics. “As a leading real estate firm in Maryland, they have the responsibility to their consumers as well as their agents, to provide cutting-edge technology and maintain a competitive edge in the marketplace.”

“Today, real estate professionals need the advantage of technology to compete. SM Sold offers a web-based content management system that provides Internet marketing and social media tools to keep them connected with prospective buyers and sellers,” states Joseph Freedman, Sales Director, SM Sold.

About Onboard Informatics

Since 2001, Onboard Informatics has provided comprehensive local, regional and national real estate data solutions, powerful Web tools and Web services to some of the most innovative companies in real estate, publishing, and technology.  Onboard delivers seamless integration of lifestyle search, property listings, community, school, neighborhood, geographic and demographic information to support clients in achieving business objectives on Web and mobile platforms.  Privately held since its founding, Onboard is located in the heart of the world’s financial center in the Wall Street area of New York City.  For more information about Onboard Informatics visit www.onboardinformatics.com.

About The Creig Northrop Team of Long & Foster Real Estate, Inc.

The Creig Northrop Team, a part of Long & Foster Real Estate, Inc. is the #1 real estate team in the state of Maryland and #2 in the United States. Serving the Baltimore/Washington, DC region, The Creig Northrop Team has built a reputation for expertise and a track-record for results. For more information regarding buying and selling services in the area contact The Creig Northrop Team of Long & Foster 410.884.8362 or visit www.northropteam.com.

SM Sold

Located in Irvine, California, SM Sold is a real estate marketing agency with more than 10 years of industry experience.  The company serves real estate agents and brokers both locally and nationally and builds successful brands through websites, e-campaigns, printed materials, social media and online/offline strategies.  To contact SM Sold, call (888) 474-2004, or email contact@smsold.com.

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Tags: community data, data, lifestyle search, neighborhood navigator, neighborhoods, real estate data.

August 11th, 2011

America’s 25 Most Fun, Affordable Cities. Did your city make the list?

By Stacey Ret, Director of Marketing

Onboard had the privilege to work with two stellar companies, both of whom are clients, Better Homes & Garden Real Estate and Bloomberg Businessweek, to bring the article, “Ocean City, Md.: America’s Most Affordable Fun City,” to life.  With millions of data points to pull from, Onboard worked closely with BHGRE to analyze over 6,000 zip codes nationwide, where the median home price was within 20% of the state’s median. From there, the amount of bars and restaurants were quantified, and those with the greatest number helped drum up a list of the country’s most affordable and fun cities.

Not everyone can afford to wine and dine in large cities such as New York or Chicago. Here are some other great destinations where you can have a night out on the town, at an affordable price!

Read the article for the full list

Tags: Best Places, Better Homes and Gardens, community information, data, Inside Onboard, lifestyle search, Onboard Informatics, Real Estate.

May 10th, 2011

The Lifestyle Search You Haven’t Seen Yet

By Jackie Berg, Marketing Manager

The recent launches of our Lifestyle Search Engine by Baird & Warner and Active Web are part of yet another exciting time for us; these newest additions to the Lifestyle Search force are reminders of how a new innovation has been conceptualized and brought to the market by the first wave of brand leaders who took the concept and ran with it.

By now hopefully you’ve seen what our clients have done with Lifestyle Search. But even with over a half a dozen clients utilizing it, perhaps the most exciting part of where we’re at today is the part of Lifestyle Search that we haven’t yet seen.

Let me explain. While Lifestyle Search is a relatively new concept, a legitimate concern as with any developing product, is differentiation.

“Some of the biggest companies have already come out with Lifestyle Search. How can my brand be different?”

You can’t blame someone for not wanting to play catch-up in a space where “catch-up” can feel like triathlon training. Vision and consensus, budget and development, QA testing and launch efforts don’t come easy (or  –  unabashed plug – in the dark, without our help). That’s why when our Product team brought Lifestyle Search Engine to life, one of the first things they thought of was creating market leaders that can even co-exist within the same marketplace.

Back to the current launches (and here is where I apologize if any of our clients have become bug-eyed my prior statement): defining the “lifestyle” part of it is as much about how these search criteria fit your brand as it is in reference to the untapped preferences of a buyer.

When we say Lifestyle Search, we could mean:

• A slider-based development, as many of our clients have implemented
• Drop-downs (in lieu of sliders) plugged into lead forms or preference statements
• The ability to segment your users the way you would in a marketing campaign (“here’s a page for retirees with a search of the things they think are important; here’s a page for first-time buyers”)
• Widgets pushed downstream to your agents to add to your bottom line
• An endless supply of blog content to fuel your hyperlocal SEO (“10 best golf towns in my county”) through use of the widget or API
• However you interpret over 50 ways to filter and refine the user’s results

Fortunately for the broad market we had in mind when we built this thing, many of the above have yet to be taken advantage of. And of those that have, creating an identical search experience is almost out of the question.

May 9th, 2011

The Active Enterprise Network creates “10 Lifestyle Searches in 10 Weeks” challenge, partnering with Onboard Informatics, the pioneer of Lifestyle Search

By Stacey Ret, Director of Marketing

May 9, 2011 – New York, NY. In an effort to drive lifestyle search to the forefront of the real estate industry, The Active Enterprise Network, will be participating in the Enterprise Network Challenge: 10 Lifestyle Searches in 10 Weeks in which their technology partner, Active Website, launches the lifestyle search engine on a different member’s site each week.

Stemming from their extended partnership with Onboard Informatics, Enterprise Network members now have access to the necessary data needed for lifestyle search, an innovative search tool that gives customers a personalized search experience on real estate websites. Through this new lifestyle search engine, customers will be able to search for homes based on parameters most important to them. Whether that’s family-friendly areas or homes close to highly rated schools, nightlife or shopping, the system will match each user’s requirements with a targeted list of ideal communities in the area.

Using a sliding scale, customers have the option to rank how important each criteria is to their particular needs and lifestyle. The system then finds neighborhoods that best fit their criteria and showcases available homes in the area. Once they’ve found their ideal community, customers can narrow their search based on number of beds and baths, square footage, price range and more.

Remaining on the cutting edge of innovation, many members have already chosen to implement lifestyle search on their site. The first member to adopt this feature is Residential Properties, LTD. Based in Providence, RI, Residential Properties has been serving the Rhode Island Real Estate market for over 30 years and was a great first candidate for the launch of this product. Through the latest search technology, Residential Properties is able to further enrich the user experience and gain a competitive advantage in the industry.

“There is a lot of competition on the web, so finding new ways to differentiate yourself from the competition is crucial to the success of your business. Through lifestyle search, not only are members providing a service that the competition doesn’t offer, but they’re able to engage the customer and increase the likelihood that they will buy or sell a home from them in the future. Typically, when an agent meets with a client they’re asking important questions such as “How important are schools for you?” or “Would you rather live in an urban setting or in the suburbs?” and so on. However, these same questions are not often addressed online. Lifestyle search bridges this gap and offers a unique approach for a more positive experience for our users,” states Ido Zucker, Managing Partner at Active Website.

The search parameters within the lifestyle search engine are based on over a decade of Onboard’s experiencedeveloping Best Places to Live solutions for top publishers such as CNN/Money, U.S. News & World Report and BusinessWeek. To ensure accuracy of the search results, the search engine combines millions of data points ranging from population demographics to housing trends to local points of interest and more.

Due to the complex functionality required to power lifestyle search accurately and efficiently, it is reserved for elite companies only. Through Active Website’s technology, coupled with data provided by Onboard, members are able to engage customers more than ever before.

“It is Onboard’s goal to provide compelling content and powerful tools that allow homebuyers to search for homes based on what is important in their lives -beyond the physical needs of the home. Lifestyle search not only accomplishes that, but also engages the visitor and keeps them coming back to the site, providing the differentiation that The Active Enterprise Network is seeking,” states Marc Siden, CEO, Onboard Informatics. “We are pleased to work with a network that understands the importance of providing consumers with tools and information they want.”

To see the enhanced features offered through the lifestyle search engine, visit Residential Properties at www.residentialproperties.com. Be sure to visit Active Website’s blog over the next several weeks as they track the progress of these releases as well.

About The Active Enterprise Network

The Active Enterprise Network member base is by invitation only. Comprised solely of private real estate firms, The Enterprise Network does not accept national brands and only works with one company per marketplace. This exclusivity allows for open collaboration and sharing of information within The Network, free from any conflict of interest. The goal for members under The Enterprise Network umbrella is to address the technology demands that are emerging in today’s changing real estate market. Together, Enterprise Network members can make the best decisions concerning implementation of systems and solutions, ultimately leveraging everyone to higher levels of business.

About Onboard Informatics

Since 2001, Onboard Informatics has provided comprehensive local, regional and national real estate data solutions, powerful Web tools and Web services to some of the most innovative companies in the real estate, publishing, and technology.  Onboard delivers seamless integration of property listings, community, school, neighborhood, geographic and demographic information to support clients in achieving business objectives on Web and mobile platforms.  Privately held since its founding, Onboard is located in the heart of the world’s financial center in the Wall Street area of New York City.  For more information about Onboard Informatics visit www.onboardinformatics.com.

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Tags: Best Places, Clients, lifestyle search, neighborhood data, news, real estate data, real estate market, school information.