I remember a few years ago being upset when someone was marketing a house I was selling as their listing. At the time protectionism was in full force by NAR and they had us convinced that all the data needed to be protected. For why, I can’t remember. I only remember there being some doomsday scenario about licensed real estate people who weren’t “REALTORS” screwing unsuspecting buyers.
Fast forward to 2009. RealComp in Detroit is appealing the FTC’s decision to force RealComp to publish listing data to promote cooperation. NAR’s continued protectionism strategies have me personally baffled. I’ve had run in’s with several real estate agents this year who did not like my firm picking their listings out and advertising them. Even though they haven’t opted-out of the provision which allows us to do so.
I actually ran across other people marketing some of our properties only to stop and call them in a thankful way. Why wouldn’t we want everyone to market our properties? I hope my properties are on 100 different websites. I hope my competitor’s like my company’s listings well enough to push them to their clients.
Take a quick peak at the busiest real estate portals according to Property Portal Watch and ComScore:
Website (Total Unique Visitors by ‘000)
SouFun.com Limited (13,056)
Yahoo! Real Estate (10,225)
focus.cn (10,087)
Move Network (7,599)
SINA Real Estate (6,099)
ganji.com (5,123)
ImmobilienScout24 (4,396)
MSN Real Estate (3,956)
Enormo Sites (3,590)
AOL Real Estate (3,259)
Although many of these are foreign, where is REALTOR.com? Of course they have arrangements to populate many of these sites. Don’t we go on assume we are the best marketers? In fact we aren’t. These large data portals are able to do marketing better than we can ever hope to.
Visibility is your friend. I love nothing more than getting stat updates from Zillow, Trulia, and other hubs showing how many property views and inquiries each home has had. How many agents are assembling this data and presenting it to their listing owners?
Make your data shareable.
Popularity: 5% [?]
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
No related posts.
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.