Do Business Hours Impact Google Rankings for Real Estate Agents?

It appears that Google's "openness" ranking factor is now being applied to real estate agents more than it was two months ago when the ranking factor was first discovered.

I'll show some evidence below, but first a quick update:

• Joy Hawkins and the Sterling Sky team first posted/posited in early December that your business will rank higher in Google's local/maps results during the hours you set as "open" in your Google Business Profile.

• Danny Sullivan confirmed this "openness" ranking factor on Twitter.

• The folks at BrightLocal did some research early on that showed "openness" was not impacting real estate much, and my own testing confirmed that (as I wrote about in issue #21 of my newsletter).

I've been keeping an eye on this in the meantime, and I've started seeing "openness" impact real estate rankings much more in the past week. Here's some of what I'm seeing.

Example #1: "real estate agents denver"

I did these searches on January 30. First search was late morning in Denver. Second search was in the evening. This is pretty self-explanatory. For both searches, the #1 agent is open 24 hours. For the morning search, spots 2 and 3 were agents who closed at 6 PM and 4:30 PM, respectively. When I searched at 7:30 PM, both were replaced by businesses that are open 24 hours.

Here's the second search:

Example #2: "real estate companies near me"

I did this search at 4:45 on February 1st. There aren't a lot of offices near my home, but as you can see, all three in the local pack are open at this hour.

The businesses ranking 2nd and 3rd above are both well-established teams/brokerages that have been around for a while and show up even though they're in the next town over.

I did the same search the following day, but after hours -- at 9:30 pm on February 2nd. Look at the 2nd and 3rd rankings in the local pack:

Community RE still ranks #1 despite being closed. They're literally the only real estate office in the town/ZIP code where I live, so geography is a stronger factor here than business hours. But spots 2 and 3 have changed to two businesses that are listed as open on a Friday night at 9:30 PM.

Example #3: "fresno real estate agents"

Here's the most recent example, and the strongest visuals showing how agents who are open 24 hours show up in the local pack while other agents are closed. For this query, I did three searches at different times yesterday (Feb. 6). Have a look:

At 3 PM, the entire top three are businesses with a fixed closing hour. But things change after dinner:

At 7 PM, the previous top two agents -- which closed at 4:30 PM and 6 PM, respectively, are gone from the local pack. The previous #3, who's still open, moves up to #1. The other two spots are taken by agents who are also open at 7 PM.

I checked one more time last night at 11 PM. Check this out.

The previous #1, who closed at 9 PM, is now gone. All three businesses here are open 24 hours.

When I (and BrightLocal, too, apparently) did my original round of research in December, there was nothing this dramatic. Same thing when I checked in January. Real estate was mostly immune from seeing "openness" as a ranking factor.

That's definitely not the case now. And when you see rankings like this, it gets a lot harder to convince clients not to set their GBP to "open 24 hours." The best agents don't want to disappear just because they're willing to be honest about their business hours.

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