Lore

Nest Realty Group Enhancements

This upcoming February will mark two years since we first help launch Nest Realty Group into the wild. A lot of great things have happened since then, including:

Recently, we’ve been working to help the Nest team bring this statement to life.

“At Nest, we believe in empowering our clients with the right information and guidance to help enable them to make wise real estate decisions.”

The information part of that sentence is where we’ve been having fun. Three recent features highlight how we’re using information and data to bring that statement to life.

  1. Price changes: showcasing price changes for a given listing over time. Great for searchers to see how aggressively a home is being changed. Or how an agent might be gaming the system.
    Nest Price Changes
  2. New listings: showcasing newly listed homes, and allowing searches by defined ranges. Great for keeping an eye on new inventory hitting the market.
    Nest New Listings
  3. Market reports: this is a doozy. The Nest team has been providing insightful blog posts around Charlottesville real estate data for the last couple years. They wanted to automate some of that process and make it easier for the end consumer to access trends for the area. We’ll explain this a bit deeper in an upcoming post, but suffice to say, we’re doing some crazy math with MLS data.
    Nest Market Reports

Bringing it All Together – The New Nest Home Page

Nest Home Page

Why a New Home Page? Two reasons:

  1. It was time for a refresh. They’ve been collecting feedback and suggestions for the last couple years, and they recently produced a great video explaining what Nest Realty is all about. Why say it when you can show it?
  2. We wanted to bring all the new features described above into one place. They represent a key differentiating factor of the Nest site, and presenting them on the home page was a logical next step to surface those features.Ways to Search on Nest Realty

The Process
Most of our projects start in sketching phase. This was no different. We went from sketches, to wireframes, to the final presentation, checking in with the Nest team and our internal team along the way. Here’s a quick look at the sketch-to-wireframe process. The final home page was pretty close after some tweaking.

Nest Wireframe
Measuring Success
So, how do we determine if this was worth it? Couple of ways.

1. Segment “Visitors Who Use Price Changes or New Listing Search”

Visitor Segments
Custom segment in Google Analytics

This lets us isolate the activities of site visitors that use our new search functionality. Do they visit more pages? Complete more goals? Return more frequently?

Here’s one compelling argument for implementing these new features. Notice how often visitors in this segment return to the Nest Web site.

Visitor Loyalty for "Used New Listing or Price Change Search" Segment
Visitor Loyalty for “Used New Listing or Price Change Search” Segment

2. Another option is to look at the average pages/visit and average time on site metrics for these visitors when compared to the overall average. Pretty nice.

Pages/Visit
Pages per visit for our custom segment compared to site average

Average time on site
Average time on site for our custom segment compared to site average

So, What’s Next?

Stay tuned for the launch of the FULL market reports section, along with some other fun ideas we’re hashing through with the Nest Realty team.