Nothing on Those Real Estate Pages Counted as a Fact

Tuesday night, kitchen table, forty real estate homepages opened one after another, a coffee going cold beside the laptop.

I wasn’t reading the copy and I wasn’t judging the layouts. I could tell you which of the forty looked expensive, and it wouldn’t be much use to you.

I was scrolling to the bottom of each page’s source hunting for a run of curly brackets, and at some point my wife asked what exactly I was doing to myself.

On the good ones it was sitting right there. Words like priceRange and openingHours down the left, a value typed in after each one, the office phone number in a slot of its own like a form someone had bothered to fill in.

On most of them, nothing. The page ended, and that was that.

Forty homepages is a long night and a rotten use of a Tuesday. I keep doing it because the sites people brag about and the sites a machine can read out loud are not always the same sites.

Schema markup is the name for the block I was hunting, and it’s the reason a machine can repeat your hours, your area and your asking price to a stranger who never opened your website.

60.2% of the sites I audited in this trade carry one.

Travel companies came out lower. So did accountants. Nobody else came in under you.

The trade sitting immediately above yours is restaurants.

That comes off 4,192 real estate businesses sampled across 24 markets, so it isn’t a handful of unlucky agents in one town having a bad month.

70.5% of everything I audit carries that block, which is a strange thing to sit under when you sell the most detailed product anybody puts on the internet.

Software companies have the opposite shape, winning every check a person can type in and losing the ones that have to be built, which is at least the more flattering way round.

So what do the ones at the top of that column actually do? Four things, and not one of them is a principle.

1) The block says what the door says

Twice last week I found a phone number in that block that wasn’t the number printed on the page above it.

One belonged to an office the brokerage had moved out of. One still carried the name of a company that got bought.

Nobody had opened that part of the site since the day it was built, and why would they, when it never looks wrong on the screen?

The agents at the top treat it the way they treat the sign outside the office. Hours change, the block changes, same afternoon, no meeting about it.

It belongs on the same monthly list as the backups, the updates and everything else nobody notices until it stops.

Do you know what your website tells a machine your office hours are? Not what the sign says. What the code says.

2) Their listings live at their own address

Plenty of agent sites show their properties inside a window borrowed from the MLS provider, the multiple listing service every office in your market shares, and on my screen that arrives as a page that stops before the listings start.

Everything inside that window belongs to a different company’s address. The facts in there may well be tagged, tidily and in full, and every bit of that tagging is working for the company that owns the window.

The ones at the top keep a page for each property on their own site, with their own photographs and their own description of the street, and let the shared feed be the extra rather than the whole shop.

That’s not a small job, and it’s the only item on this list I’d call expensive.

Where do your own listings live? Open one of your property pages and read the address bar, because whoever owns that address owns the facts printed underneath it.

3) They check it instead of trusting the plugin

On two of the forty, the block was there and empty. A telephone label with nothing typed in after it. An address with the town in it and no street.

Someone had switched the plugin on in about 2019 and moved on to the next thing, which is more or less what I used to do.

The habit that separates the top of the column is boring. Paste your homepage address into Google’s Rich Results Test, read what comes back, and fix whatever it says is missing.

Two minutes. It’s the only way to see the thing I spent Tuesday night looking at.

Would you know if a plugin you’re paying for had quietly given up a year ago? I wouldn’t, not on my own site, not without going and checking it the slow way.

Agents tell me the same thing about their contact forms, that not one client has ever come through the box on the homepage, and it took me years to learn what that claim usually turns out to mean.

4) They take the sold ones down

The best files I opened had nothing stale in them anywhere.

No open house tagged for a Sunday back in March. No property marked available since the spring, when the sign on the lawn has said sold since May. No agent profile for a woman who left for a competitor two years ago.

A page that tells a machine something untrue about Sunday is worse off than a page that says nothing at all, because now you’re the office that gave her the wrong time.

When did you last read your own site the way a stranger reads it, top to bottom, looking for what’s out of date?

Why it stays broken

None of this shows up on the screen you paid for.

Your designer can’t photograph it for a portfolio. You can’t show it to your broker. No client has ever rung an agent to say the tagging on the contact page looked sharp.

So it goes to the end of the job, and the end of the job is where things go to die whenever a launch date moves. I left it there for years, on sites I was otherwise proud of, and I’d have argued with you about it at the time.

For most of a decade I kept improving the half of a real estate site a buyer can see and charged for that, while the half a machine reads sat exactly where the builder left it.

Now it’s the first hour of any real estate build I take on, before a single color gets picked.

Who was the last person to open that part of your website, and what year would that have been?

If you want to see what a property page looks like when the facts underneath it are in order, I keep a few real estate examples over here, and the code is worth more of your attention than the layouts are.

And if you’d rather I did the reading, send me your address and I’ll tell you what’s in that block, or whether there’s a block at all.

Do this before you close the laptop

Open your homepage, copy the address out of the bar, and paste it into Google’s Rich Results Test.

Give it four seconds. If it comes back empty, you’ve just found what to do with Saturday morning.