It’s been over 4 years since we launched version 1 of the Nest Realty web site. Actually, it was January 30, 2009. I remember the day well. It was a Friday. I had literally been planning and brainstorming the Nest web site for about year and had been working with our web team since since mid-summer of 2008. We had everything ready for the launch…except the site was buggy on Internet Explorer. After hours of working trough tiny bugs for IE, we decided to launch the site to the world around 7 pm on January 30, 2009. I posted the launch to Facebook and, amazingly, we had 67 visitors that night.
67. I couldn’t believe it.
And I really couldn’t believe it when my friends at 1000 Watt Consulting picked up the Nest Realty site about a week later.
Since then, we’ve had over 450,000 visitors and more than 3.6 million page views on the Nest Realty site…coming from all 50 states and over 150 countries. To take it one step further, visitors have spent 45,000 hours on nestrealty.com since our launch. That’s well over 5 years of time searching for Charlottesville and New River Valley real estate on the Nest site alone…in just about 4 years of being online. Wow. Pretty darn amazing.
Since our initial launch, the Nest site has come a long way. Our initial home page was, admittedly (in hindsight) kind of ugly and maybe a little clunky. We’ve done 3 major re-vamps to the site. In addition, we launched our Nest Realty mobile-optimized site in the September 2012. The decision to launch the mobile-optimized site came from the fact that mobile traffic to the Nest Realty site increased from 3% in 2009 to almost 10% in 2011. As we anticipated, Nest Realty experienced approximately 20% of our total web traffic from mobile devices in 2012. (And we expect that to increase to more than 25% in 2013.)
So, what’s in store for our next round of updates? A lot. At Nest, we’re always looking to improve. We look outside the real estate industry and within the real estate industry. As I mentioned, we launched our Nest mobile-optimized site about 6 months ago…we’re now planning to integrate that with our ‘desktop’ site. In other words: if you save a property on the Nest desktop site, you’ll be able to access it on the mobile site…and vice-versa. It sounds simple, but it’s important to us to tie the functionality of the mobile and desktop sites together.
Speaking of functionality, we’re planning to increase the functionality of the Nest site to appeal to 2013 users. What do we mean? First off, we’re going to improve our search functionality. Second off, we’re going to update our property detail pages to get with the times: more information, bigger fonts, and improved layouts. What else? We’re improving our portfolio/favorites function based on the feedback we’ve received. Overall, we’re improving our web experience based on feedback from you.
We’ve got some more tricks up our sleeves, also. But overall, we’re just trying to get better: better search, better results, and a better overall experience for you, our customers.
I’ll admit that, in the grand scheme of things, we are a small brokerage. However, at Nest, we are constantly looking to get better: not just from our web site, but from the service that each and every one of our agents provides to our clients. We’ve made some great progress in the last few years…and it’s only going to get better.
Thanks for your support of Nest Realty over the past 4+ years. We look forward to continue to provide the absolute best service to you int he years to come.