Internet and China 's Foreign Real Estate Agency Service

By Xiping Zhang

1. Good impacts of Internet on China 's foreign real estate agency service

Since the end of 1990s, real estate agencies that provide services to foreign companies and individuals in the big cities of China like Beijing and Shanghai started to use internet to promote their traditional real estate agency services. In a period less than ten years, Internet has already brought some significant impacts on the foreign real estate agency service in China . For real estate agencies serving in this area, though most of them are still staying at a relatively young stage in using Internet to support their traditional services in terms of using the latest Internet technologies and concepts to develop, manage as well as to promote their websites, they can deeply feel the following advantages of using Internet.

1) Promote real estate agency service in a global sense at a relatively low cost

By developing a website which mainly contains the property info and the service info as well as the relevant information at a not so high cost, real estate agencies in China has got a brand new way to promote their traditional real estate agency services globally. By promoting their website mainly through the search engine websites like Google and Yahoo, real estate agencies in China can now show their services to the whole world very conveniently. Compared with using traditional newspaper and magazine, the cost of using Internet for promoting real estate agency service is relatively low. This is more obvious for small and medium-sized agencies. Not very much big difference can be seen for a big agency and a small one in promoting online.

2) Easy access to foreign real estate consumers and players in and out of China

Internet has greatly shortened the distance between real estate agencies in China and the foreign real estate consumers who may need Chinese real estate products and services no matter where they are. Before Internet times, besides other channels, real estate agencies in the several big cities in China mainly used foreign language newspapers and magazines for market promotion. This means that only those foreign companies or individuals who probably had already arrived in China and had had the resources of the newspapers and magazines in their hands can be the potential customers of the real estate agencies who were doing advertisings on the newspapers and magazines. Now, Internet has given the agencies the chance to get accessed to any foreign real estate customers in the world whether they are in China or not. Besides, Internet has given China 's real estate agencies and their foreign counterparts the chance to meet together online for exploring cooperative opportunities and building business partner relationships. China 's real estate agency service providers also get the chance to learn from their foreign counterparts that helps China 's young agency service to merge into the global real estate service industry faster and easier.

3) 24/7 agency service is available now

In the past, agencies can only provide their services mostly in their working hours. Now, with their property as well as their service information being listed on internet all the time, the agencies' services are exposed to the world in a 24/7 sense. They may get property search email requests from prospective consumers who live in the other part of the world and come in when they are still sleeping in the night;

4) Time advanced advantage

In the past, most of the agencies in China started to get in touch with their foreign real estate consumers at a time when these customers have arrived in China or will come to China soon. Now, the real estate agency service providers can get accessed to these customers much earlier than before;

5) Convenient and quick updating of the listing information

Internet makes it possible for real estate agencies to revise their information on their website by themselves very easily. Besides, unlike using traditional media like newspaper or magazine, there will be no time lagged behind problem. They can update the old information or add new ones at any time they want very quickly.

6) Better understanding about the customers and the market

By tracking the relevant information of their website visitors, real estate agencies can easily find what the visitors are looking for on their websites, where they are from, what types of information they feel most interested, etc. By analyzing the valuable information, real estate agencies can get better understandings about the customers and the market. This helps them to adjust their service according to the needs of the market as well as to improve the structure and the contents of their website.

2. Challenges for China 's real estate agency service providers in using Internet to support their services

1) How to develop, manage and promote a real estate website successfully

For most of the real estate agencies here in China , since they lack of the knowledge, experience and human resources in using internet to support and improve their traditional agency services, how to develop a quality real estate website is the first problem that quite some of them run into. Some even feel hard to get started though they have understood the importance of using Internet and have the strong willingness to use it. Besides, even if they can develop a relatively successful website with the help of the professional website development companies, how to manage and maintain their website well from a long term perspective has really been a challenge for most of the real estate agencies. Now, with more and more real estate agencies hanging their website online, how to promote their website efficiently and costly is another new challenge for them and the challenge is getting bigger and bigger. One of the effective ways for promoting a website globally for the agencies in China is to use search engine websites like Google and Yahoo. One very popular problem for the agencies is how to understand and use search engine website effectively. Most of the agencies lack of the knowledge, experience and people in managing their search engine account well. More than that, with more and more real estate agency advertisers trying to rank at a relatively good place on the first search result page, the cost of using the search engine websites is getting higher and higher while the effectiveness of using them is getting lower and lower. It seems that it is a trend that the cost for developing a website is getting lower and lower while the cost for promoting a website is getting higher and higher. More different and new website promotion methods have been waited eagerly.

Meanwhile, since the real estate agencies need to focus on their key business, they have little time and chance to get to know the latest internet technologies, concepts and so on. After they develop their first website, few of them will continually do improvements on their websites from these aspects. In terms of using the relatively new Internet technologies and concepts, China 's real estate agencies still have a lot to do. This has influenced the effective use of Internet to support or improve the traditional real estate agency service in China to some extent.

2) How to serve the clients coming from internet who are different to some extent from those coming from traditional ways successfully

Internet plays a more and more important role in supporting the real estate agency service. More and more agencies are using Internet to support their business. Finding potential customers through Internet becomes more and more popular. Since the clients coming from Internet have the following different characteristics if compared with those coming from traditional ways, how to provide efficient services to these clients and finally serve them successfully have been challenging the agencies.

3. Suggestions for foreign real estate consumers to better use Internet for finding real estate agencies in China

1) Before spending a lot of time on reading the detailed property or service information of an real estate agency's website, it's better for foreign real estate consumers to read the “About us” part carefully and try to get a brief understanding about the general background of the agency, such as the information of company established year, company size, service areas, yearly transaction volume, customers served before, awards, etc.

2) To contact several agencies first and then choose 2 or 3 for contact and finally choose 1 or 2 for the service;

3) To use a 3-rd party's information in selecting an agency;

4) To use the real estate information from Internet for reference.

Comments are welcome to send to the author at info@beijingrealestate.com.

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