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In a new phase of my ongoing relationship with Pennsylvania-based online education provider McKissock LP, I recently researched the pros and cons of third-party real estate sites like Zillow and Trulia, and produced statistics-based content for a professional development course. The topic, provided by the client, is incredibly important to real estate professionals today: Zillow/Trulia are revolutionizing the way that individuals buy and sell homes, and consequently altering how real estate agents do their jobs. (Of course, I only fully understood this after 15 hours of research. In the beginning, I was like Wha?)

My objective was to provide real estate professionals with usable and impactful statistics to shed light on how real estate is changing and whether or not advertising with these third-party sites is worth the high costs. Considering that Zillow and Trulia attract staggering numbers of unique visitors each month and are unquestionably reshaping real estate, there is a remarkable lack of data on ROI for real estate professionals who advertise with them. All told, I clocked 15 hours of research and pulled together tidbits of data from over a dozen articles, surveys, polls, and web traffic reports.

Armed with all of this data and information, the next step was to organize it into a logical, approachable article featuring the most pertinent takeaways for the real estate professionals who’d eventually be taking the professional development course. This is when the timeless practice of outlining comes into play.

The end product was a 13-page long article aggregating (one might argue) all of the most relevant numbers on perhaps the most intriguing variable in the real estate industry today.

(Totally worth it.)