How Solid Earth 4x’d customer touchpoints with Local Content

The value of a property can be attributed to a variety of traditional real estate data, including the year it was built, the type of renovations, and specific features, such as parking. The remaining 58%, however, depends on its location, which includes transit access, amenities, and neighborhood character. Location value has historically been difficult to quantify, leading to the increasing use of data-driven solutions in the real estate industry to uncover a property’s full value.

Company — TRIBUS Group provides technology solutions for 100,000+ agents at premier real estate brokerages and MLS/Associations around the world

TRIBUS Group, founded in 2009, operates multiple brands within the real estate technology space including TRIBUS, Priced Equity, Solid Earth, Ezement, Displet, MapTrack, Uniform, and more.  

TRIBUS provides brokerages with a suite of integrated services, including front-facing custom websites, CRM platforms, and back-end tools for brokerage staff and agents. The company helps brokers turn leads into sales, enhance their brand identity, build lasting client relationships, and recruit and retain employees. With offices in Colorado, Missouri, and additional full-time remote employees covering the entire USA, TRIBUS Group serves over 75,000 brokerage and MLS/Association agent clients throughout 41 states and more internationally.

Solid Earth provides advanced SaaS solutions for MLSs and Associations to help agents get more views of their listings, manage and aggregate those properties, enhance accessibility to data, and simplify the day-to-day life of a real estate agent. 

In early 1999, Solid Earth launched the first web-based MLS platform. Since then, the brand has been committed to solving MLS and Association issues to better serve agents and consumers. With nearly 25 years of enterprise experience, Solid Earth aims to be a company at the core of an MLS/Association’s business. Recently, Solid Earth launched its newest offering, Ezement, a single identity record for every real estate agent in the county.

Challenge — Filling location data gaps proves difficult

There is absolutely no doubt that an MLS or Association providing a website to highlight their members’ listings is beneficial. Some Solid Earth clients produce thousands of leads and millions of listing views per month for members often beating the big-name players in the portal space. 

But to stay competitive, MLSs and Associations must ensure that their website provides data that satisfies the needs of home seekers. Consumers want information that not only includes property details, but also gives a comprehensive picture of the neighborhood that they are looking to move in.

To make consumers’ search for the ideal home as easy as possible, local MLSs should avoid burdening them with additional research across multiple sites. Otherwise, they risk losing consumers to larger portal sites.

As part of its commitment to these MLSs and Associations, Solid Earth must find a way to efficiently collect and provide robust data and valuable neighborhood insights.

There is not enough data for a full neighborhood assessment

Most data solutions available on the market have limited location data, and do not paint an accurate picture of the neighborhood. The information would be either inaccurate, outdated, or missing altogether. Some vendors only provide minimal school data and lack information on other points of interest or commute times, which are essential to a home seeker’s understanding of the area.

Datasets are fragmented across multiple providers

To gather all the information Solid Earth needed, they had to rely on multiple third-party providers. There was no centralized solution to collect all these data points in one place. These fragmented datasets made it difficult for Solid Earth to provide comprehensive insights to its clients.  

Data solutions lack flexibility

Some data solutions were limited in their functionality and flexibility. For example, they couldn’t provide all the local information home seekers needed in one single API or they required cost-intensive modeling to create the needed datasets. Those limitations hindered Solid Earth’s development team from quickly integrating reliable solutions for clients.

Solution — Local Logic offers a comprehensive location intelligence solution with valuable neighborhood insights

Local Logic is a location intelligence solution that digitizes the built world for consumers, investors, developers, and governments. It offers precise analytics on 250M+ individual addresses in the U.S. and Canada.

The TRIBUS Group of companies first learned about Local Logic through industry events. Local Logic’s data solutions caught the company’s attention, and they were impressed with the Canadian real estate sites that integrated Local Logic’s products.

Since Local Logic had a more comprehensive location dataset than other providers, TRIBUS Group partnered with the former to deliver actionable insights for their clients’ brokerage and MLS/Association websites. As a constant innovator, the TRIBUS Group of companies was the first to launch Local Logic data to MLSs & Associations and the first to launch the data in the U.S. to the Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices, Anywhere, Re/Max, and Leading Real Estate Companies of the World networks. 

In addition, the company has worked with Local Logic to provide data in the mapping provider of the client’s choice including Google Maps, Open Street Maps, and Apple Map.

School data and boundaries

TRIBUS Group found Local Logic’s School data and boundaries integration to be the most useful as it creates an optimal experience for families seeking the right home with the right school. By displaying not just districts, but elementary school attendance zones on a map, consumers can filter them by type, level, or language, and search for properties within a specific school boundary, which is an important feature for many TRIBUS customers like RE/MAX Results, the #1 brokerage in Minnesota and one of the largest Re/Max franchises in the world.

School boundaries on RE/MAX Results

Local Content

Local Content provides a comprehensive understanding of the location of any property in the U.S. and Canada. It can be added to any site and provides an overview of the characteristics that matter to the home buyer and renter.

Local Content implemented on the Oklahoma Association of Realtors website

Local Content offers the following:

• 18 distinct Location Scores to evaluate a location
• 0-10 rating for each score and a sentence describing that specific criteria
• Nearby Points of Interest
• School data
• Commute time functionality

This integration helps visualize different narratives based on the neighborhood characteristics they value as they browse listings.

“Local Content provides lots of value packed into one widget. Whereas most providers only offered a specific set of data, like schools, Local Logic gave us one-stop-shop access to multiple datasets, which included points of interest and commute time as well.

Solid Earth customers also love the widget because of its fast load time and compact design. Many consumers find the amount of data useful in their home search, especially on websites like Oklahoma.RealEstate that cover very large areas where they aren’t necessarily familiar.”

 

— Katie Ragusa, VP of Product at TRIBUS Group

Results — Solid Earth captured highly qualified leads through interactions with location insights

Increased customer engagement

Adding Local Logic to Solid Earth’s toolbox helps potential buyers find more value in their sites and make them more likely to engage with a member of the MLS or Association versus becoming a lead sold to the highest bidder. Solid Earth uses Local Content to draw visitors to view more of the page and better engage with the listing.  

According to a heat map of visitor interactions on the Oklahoma.RealEstate site, consumers who scroll to the Local Content widget use all the provided tools, indicating that they find the user experience easy to understand and useful. This includes the school ratings components, points of interest search, and commute time calculator.

Heat map of customer interactions on the Local Content widget

Schools topped the list of most visitors’ interests. The property’s location and commute time also recorded many interactions across different listings.

Below is a zoomed-out heat map that shows how visitors interact with the rest of the listing:

Heat map of customer interactions on a Oklahoma.RealEstate listing

Property photos received the majority of interactions. Close behind that, all tying for second position, are:

• Site’s main navigation
• Mortgage calculator
• Property description
• Recent blog 
• Offers of compensation 
• Four touchpoints on Local Content — no other component had that many interaction points (they each only had one)!

Top-notch prospects with high purchase intent reach the bottom of the listing while engaging with every section. Even though the information is spread from top to bottom, interested consumers interact with the entire page. Although they are mostly focused on the main listing, they are eager to scroll down to find information that supplements the listing itself before clicking a call-to-action or registering for an account.

Meaningful context to enhance MLS & Association websites

In contrast to certain data vendors that may only provide limited information, Local Logic offers a complete range of location insights about the listing’s area for Solid Earth customers. 

By integrating hyperlocal data from Local Logic into MLSs property listings, Solid Earth provides consumers with deeper insights into the area where a home is located. With location data, people can get a sense of what it’s like to live there and decide whether it’s the right place for them. Home seekers who understand the unique value that location brings to a property can make a more confident and informed decision about where they want to live

“The Association, whether local or statewide, should always offer services, tools, and programs for their members to excel at their craft. By contributing their listings to Oklahoma.RealEstate, our members can become experts in their own area with the tools offered to them.

The Association must work in the best interest of the REALTOR®. Realtors feel like they are getting the best value from our site when tools like Local Logic’s location insights are provided at no extra charge.”

 — Jessica Hickok, Chief Executive Officer at Oklahoma Association of REALTORS®

Access to multiple datasets within one platform

As an end-to-end data provider, Local Logic enabled Solid Earth to obtain not only school data, but also points of interest and commute information as well. In fact, most of Solid Earth’s clients were surprised to find out that Local Logic offered a commute calculator, but were delighted to know that the feature was available to them.

Ease of use and fast implementation

By obtaining aggregated data from a single source, Solid Earth reduced its workload and saved time and money by eliminating the need to integrate with multiple providers.

The integration process is one of the things that Solid Earth enjoyed the most about this partnership. Local Logic’s tools are easy to implement and use — which minimizes the learning curve and keeps training time at a minimum. As a result, Solid Earth was able to enrich its customers’ websites without adding to their timeline when launching a new customer.

Tailored support with flexible features

With the help of Local Logic’s exhaustive documentation, Solid Earth received the support it needed throughout the implementation process. Local Logic’s Product team was also very responsive and receptive to feedback to ensure that Solid Earth’s data needs were met. For instance, Solid Earth can choose whichever option works best for them — whether they prefer to consume data through an API or SDK.

Want to see how you can upgrade your brokerage tools?
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Association or MLS Executive that wants to learn more
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