Today's real estate broker faces some difficult decisions when it comes to online advertising. The choices are often predicated upon what your competition is doing, what sellers demand, traffic and leads generated by your website or franchise website, website owner terms of use, who gets the lead, and who pays – agent or broker. It is really quite a mess. It is so bad, that many large firms have walked away from it entirely and leave it up to the agent.

Other firms have taken the proverbial bull by the horn and worked hard to market listings online is a very controlled and purposeful fashion. Howard Hanna is one of those brokers.

About Howard Hanna

Howard Hanna is among the most dominant online marketing brokers in America. In their core cities of Pittsburgh and Cleveland, traffic to their broker website is greater than the national sites like realtor.com®, Zillow, Trulia, and Homes.com (Hitwise). But Howard Hanna stretches well beyond those two metropolitan areas. The firm covers most of Pennsylvania, most of Ohio, and parts of Virginia, Michigan, upstate New York, West Virginia, North Carolina, and Maryland (169 offices in total). They are the fourth largest firm in North America, trading 52,827 homes and $9.7 billion in closed sales in 2013.

Howard Hanna is also a full service firm offering consumers services in Mortgage, Title, and Insurance. An important component of the Realtor.com arrangement is not only that broker competition is not displayed on a Howard Hanna listing, but neither is any other competition from home services companies. Howard Hanna listings are generating leads for all of the affiliated companies they have. The effort also extends to the Realtor.com mobile application, too.