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by aepearson 3556 days ago
I sort of like it. Basically a slightly nicer version of craigslist.

To be honest though... With my experience in this particular niche...I don't "get it".

The pages are printer friendly (a lot of realtors gripe about that). Pages load fast. Gallery/map view. It's challenging to integrate with that many MLS' as well...Some good stuff in there. It's obviously you put a lot of work into it.

Great job on doing something against the grain.

If the purpose is to make money...probably not the greatest site. Other than a very tiny sliver of the population who appreciates this sort of approach (ie. hackernews readers), most people are going to bounce right off the site.

The single biggest missing piece is any sort of search functionality. It's REALLY annoying to use the site for anything other than a bit of browsing.

That said - great work...I hope you got paid!

EDIT * The more time I spend trying to hate this website, the more I end up liking it. Mission accomplished :)

1 comments

Thanks for the great feedback. Current average visit is about 9 minutes...so it seems pretty sticky compared to our more polished/shiny real estate sites (7 min avg).

We will most likely add an advanced search down the road, but as someone who has made their living with real estate websites for a dozen years, I love this one the most (as is).

How about bounce rate comparison?

From a user perspective - I spent more time on the site than I do any other real estate site...because I was trying to figure out where to find things, and it took significantly longer to look at multiple areas than any other site.

I'm not sure time on site is a reasonable measure of success - but I also think 9 minutes is impressive regardless :)

You definitely have me thinking about doing some experimentation in minimalism (we, apparently, service a very similar niche).

Actually, we don't service the real estate industry, we're in the real estate industry. It's a long story[1] but we stumbled into the business. The main idea behind Dane Arthur is that we need to stand out from everyone else. We built a niche real estate company/brokerage to $200M/year in sales on the back of a website and want to expand our offerings, but not our geography.

And you're 100% correct about time on site. The only measure we're really interested in is converting unique users into happy clients.

[1] http://davegooden.com/2013/08/our-story-10-years-of-bootstra...

Just wanted to say I love the site. Very refreshing to see a strong utilitarian design like this. Congratulations on your success by the way, I hope it continues
Thank you!
Very cool read! Got me all pumped up reading it actually.

I'm seeing this website in an entirely new light now haha.