For those of you who are REALTORS or Virtual Assistants who explain the benefits of having a Realtor.com Showcase/Enhanced Listing account to agent clients,  I just wanted to give you an update that just happened.

First, when I refer to an “enhanced listing”, I’m making the assumption a person has actually enhanced the listing with at least two images.

It used to be that the biggest benefit of the enhanced listing package (in my and my clients’ opinions anyway) was that the enhanced listings showed first in the search results. Same thing with having a featured tour. These were the only ways of achieving SEO within Realtor.com without having to purchase the really expensive featured property package.

Up until about 6 months ago (or so … can’t remember exactly), a person would search Realtor.com and, before showing the results, it would present them with a screen that allowed them to choose if they wanted to “display listings with multiple images first” or “display listings with virtual tours first”.  Realtor.com stats showed a great majority of people selected one of these choices. Therefore, there was great benefit to having a listing enhanced with multiple photos (only available with the paid enhanced listing package) or having a tour uplinked to Realtor.com.

Then, they changed this, adding further benefit to the showcase agent or agent with a featured tour. They made their “default” sort view act in the following way:

There were two groupings.

The first grouping included all the enhanced listings and those with a featured tour, sorted by price. In other words, say your search criteria was for homes up to $250K. The first 5 pages of search results would only display enhanced listings and listings with a virtual tour, sorted lower price to higher price. This was great for the agent who had either of these.

After those displayed, the second grouping included all the standard listings, sorted lower price to higher price. Bummer for the agent who didn’t have either of these because, more than likely, the visitor would tire before getting to those pages and their listing would never be seen.

Therefore, whether you had an enhanced listing or a featured tour, your listing was given the excellent preferred sort status.

However, they have now removed this preferred sort status. Evidently, a lot of visitors complained that it was confusing … they’d view the listings noticing they were sorted lowest price to highest price, but would get further down and the lower priced listings would start all over again (i.e., they reached the unenhanced listings).

Now, the default view just shows all listings from lower to higher dollar amount. The only sort benefit now of having an enhanced listing is within the same exact dollar amount. For example, if there are 10 listings at $250,000, the enhanced listing(s) will show before all others. Virtual tours have no preferred sort benefit now.

There is an orange nav link that allows a visitor to select a different sort view (i.e., by featured tour or multiple images); however, in my opinion, it’s not obvious and I can’t see people really using it.

I only mention all this because this was a huge factor to my clients when weighing whether to purchase 1) the enhanced listing package (it’s definitely not cheap, especially for top producers … or when it came to offices purchasing the office enhanced listing account), or 2) the Realtor.com virtual tour uplinks (generally around the $25/listing range for agents without the enhanced listing package).

So, if this preferred sorting feature was a deciding factor to you or your clients in the past, it’s now gone … and as of today, they don’t have any plans on bringing it back.