How Vistoo outperformed the industry conversion rate by 2X with location insights

The recent economic downturn has not left the real estate industry unscathed. With the rise in interest rates and construction costs, builders have become more reluctant to build, and companies must turn to data-driven solutions to navigate this cooldown and protect their bottom line.

Company — Vistoo shapes better home buying experiences

Vistoo is a Canadian real estate platform that connects homebuyers with developers while equipping them with data-driven insights to guide their home purchasing decision.

With Vistoo, consumers can gather detailed information on a project’s characteristics and demographics about the neighborhood in which it is located. Their goal is to help people find their next home — one that fits their lifestyle.

Challenge — Improving website stickiness through insightful content

As a new player in the Quebec residential real estate scene, which generated $46B in the last year, Vistoo was entering a competitive market. Their main challenge is convincing buyers and renters to use their website as a reference research tool. Vistoo operates a listing platform, so optimizing its website — its most valuable asset — will help it stand out from the competition. With a focus on improving its user interface and features, the company puts innovation at the heart of its initiatives.

Part of those initiatives is increasing stickiness to ensure that visitors stay, engage, and return to their website. A sticky website will draw and keep people’s attention, answer questions, and deliver value. The key to creating stickiness is to offer a pleasant user experience, which can be achieved through content that is insightful, easy to understand, and makes people want to read more.

To ensure that users remain long enough on their website to learn about the company, Vistoo needed to provide the right kind of insights — ones that people are actually looking for. The absence of contextual information can lead visitors to leave a website in search of information on a competitor’s platform.

For an optimal website experience, Vistoo needed content that is:

• Optimized for search engines to maximize discoverability and reach the right people
• Digestible and attention-grabbing to incite visitors to click through
• Educational to provide a deeper understanding of a neighborhood and lifestyle
• Granular at the street level to showcase precise location details
• Unique and curated since not everyone will be interested in the same data points
• Up-to-date to deliver relevant and timely data

Solution — Local Logic’s Local Content delivers accurate street-level neighborhood data

Local Logic is a location intelligence solution that digitizes the built world for consumers, investors, developers, and governments – delivering unrivaled clarity and actionable insights capable of creating more sustainable, equitable cities. Our unique location data set of more than 75 billion data points allows us to quantify the built world and offer predictive, precise analytics to inform the present and future of over 250 million individual addresses.

Identifying a mutual interest in bringing innovative products to the more traditional real estate industry, Vistoo set off on building a long-term partnership with Local Logic. The company reached out to Local Logic to participate in our Local Content program and integrate Location Scores at the launch of their site in June 2021.

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 offers the following:

• 18 distinct Location Scores to evaluate the desirability of a location. Scores are available for any location within 5 km of a named road. They are ranked for each individual location.
• 0-10 rating for each score and a sentence describing the environment for that specific criteria
• Commute time functionality

Consumers want to see data that matters to them — data that is useful to their decision-making. Using our unique Local Content SDK and Demographics data, Vistoo was able to simplify the process of extracting meaningful insights from data.

In this case, Vistoo’s potential clients wanted to better understand the neighborhoods they might move into. Our Location Scores are a great evaluation tool that painted that picture for them. Our data shaped a story around the neighborhood, so people can get a feel of what it’s like to live there and see whether the area is well-suited for their lifestyle.

Location is one of the most important criteria when buying or renting a property. Local Logic offers tools that deliver insights on location, neighborhood, services, and nearby amenities around each house listing displayed on Vistoo.

— Enzo Fernandez, Co-Founder & CMO at Vistoo

Results — Increased stickiness yields higher conversion rates

Despite being a newcomer, Vistoo has not only one of the largest new real estate inventories in Quebec but also engagement statistics that surpass the average real estate website.

According to Ruler Analytics, real estate websites have an average conversion rate of 1.7%. Only eight months after launching its platform, Vistoo achieved an average conversion rate of 3.5% (which takes into account form fills and clicks on phone numbers).

Improving discoverability through search engines

Local Content delivers added SEO value to Vistoo’s website as it generates unique content on its listing pages. By improving the company’s search engine rankings and discoverability, this content helps it reach the right audience. Within 60 days, Vistoo more than doubled its website traffic.

Building brand equity and engagement

Vistoo’s website stickiness comes from the added micro-neighborhood data that create experiences for consumers. In addition to providing people with the information they need, relevant content also adds to brand credibility.

Using our Local Content, visitors can visualize different narratives based on which neighborhood characteristic is important to them as they browse through different listings. Our Location Scores help visitors identify nearby amenities (e.g., parks, grocery stores, and transit) and the type of lifestyle they can enjoy.

As a result, users spend a lot of time interacting with Vistoo’s website, bringing time-on-site up to 2 minutes and 40 seconds.

Developing relationships before meeting the team

Vistoo can improve conversion rates by sharing content that empowers users with helpful insights before they contact the team. With Local Logic’s SDK, Vistoo users can get precise neighborhood insights so they can have an informed sales call.

When people have access to these insights, they feel more inclined to engage with someone and get their questions answered. Beginning that conversation online is a way to build a relationship that has the potential of converting into business.

Facilitating Sales pass-off with high-quality leads

Meaningful on-site interactions keep a company top of mind for when people are ready to transact. Equipping users with the right tools helps generate higher-quality leads that are more likely to convert. The more informed customers are, the easier it is for sales teams to close. So, as users spend more time on the website, Vistoo saw its sales process shortened.

The stickier a listing detail page is, and the longer users stay on it, the likelier they are to convert from visitor to lead. By heightening the content of their most popular pages with precise location data from Local Logic, Vistoo generated more leads that convert. One of their development clients even achieved a near 40% close rate from leads provided by Vistoo!