In building our Huntsville Property search engine a lot of thought went into the decision of how advanced to make its capabilities. The decision evolved around the trade offs of ease-of-use or the support for more complicated advanced search features.
Many real estate website designs opt for ease-of-use and only supply a set of ‘canned searches’ for a limited set of search criteria and often don’t offer advanced features such as saving an explicit search for easy recall or setting up new listing email notification for individual saved searches.
The benefit of such an approach is obvious: the user does not have the ability to enter incompatible search parameters and reach the dreaded ‘No Properties Found’ page. On the business side, it also sets up a need to contact a REALTOR® sooner in your online search process.
On the other hand, for serious home buyers this greatly limits their ability to filter inappropriate properties online prior to going to the expense of time and money to take a drive-by look or schedule a few home showings. The more filtering you are able to do online; the less time and money you will waste viewing properties that don’t meet all your desired amenities.
Thus after weighing the pros and cons, we have attempted to accommodate both ease-of-use while simultaneously hosting the most advanced Real Estate search engine in the North Alabama area.
Our website design on many levels (such as the integrated area information blog, advanced search capabilities, competitor’s Google ads, RSS feeds, etc) are all designed for providing the highest level of service possible. Given this, we will follow up this blog entry with another post on some tips and tricks to better utilize our advanced search engine features.
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