When providing real estate information to home buyers, half the equation is how you present it

I’m sure by now you’ve heard the phrase kids use when their friends are telling them the intricate details of what happened last night, or whose boyfriend did this, or what was contained in that text message.

They’ll turn their heads away and say, “Whoa, TMI.”

If you think kids are suffering from Too Much Information, imagine what adults face in today’s digital age.

In fact, according to a recent University of California study, the average American consumes 34 GB worth of content a day. Ouch. It hurts my cranium just thinking about all those gigabytes entering my cranium.

What this also means is that consumers know there’s a ton of information out there about any subject.

Used to be for real estate agents on the way to a showing, you were able to ‘get by’ by simply pointing out :“There’s the high school over there, it’s a good one.” Or, mention over your shoulder “that restaurant on the corner there is nice” and leave it at that.

Not today.

Home buyers are not just searching for a home, there are conducting a lifestyle search. They want to know about schools, dining, shopping, entertainment, health facilities, transportation, new home construction, recent property sales, etc., etc., etc.. One gigabyte after another.

So what are you going to do – pile reports upon reports on them or sit there and have them scribble 10 legal pads of notes?

That’s where SpatialMatch comes in. Our hyperlocal neighborhood lifestyle search technology provides billions of bits of data covering every market in the US.

But most importantly, we focused on how to present that data to consumers in a user-friendly and easily digestible manner. Rather than give them computer printouts of endless amounts of data, we serve it to them with visuals on a map.

Home buyers have dozens of filter options from which to pick the category of data they want to see. They not only can find the items they are searching for, say middle schools, but they can also see the distances from the neighborhoods they are considering.

The information is all displayed in a visual feast, with colored-coded circles, icons and brief descriptions. It’s laid out on the map like a smorgasbord of simple graphical elements.

“The efficiency and ease-of understanding is paramount to anyone needing to really understand the relationship between the various lifestyle activities that are important to the user,” said John Perkins, CEO of Home Junction Inc., developers of SpatialMatch. “It would take forever to do this type of lifestyle search manually.”

Recently, a blogger lamented on how his data-intensive software company lost out to a competitor. In a moment of extreme candor, he said the competitor “focused on making the user do almost no work at all, by automatically editing and categorizing their data….and giving them immediate gratification as soon as they possibly could.”

“We completely sucked at all of that,” he admitted in defeat.

Ever hear of a guy named Steve Jobs? He didn’t invent the computer. But what he and his partner Steve Wozniak did was create a simple way to use a computer. Sure PCs had a ton of functions. But forget typing in all those DOS commands. Move a mouse and click.

Today’s reality: Who wants to dig for real estate information? It conjures up images of rusty shovels, leather gloves, stiff work boots and lots of dirt.

With SpatialMatch embedded on his or her site, the savvy real estate agent can reduce all of this data to just a few clicks. And lots of information that’s easy to get to and understand is really what home buyers, and their overworked brains, want to see.

They will appreciate the source of the relief (YOU) and for your part, you can go about your day knowing you effectively transferred a fair portion of the 34 gigs that your customer was going to digest that day.  All under your brand.