Day Four: 3rd Party Property Vendors
Your MLS might technically be considered a property vendor type website but more specifically vendors are websites like Trulia, Zillow, Yahoo Real Estate and many others.
The more locations you are able to advertise a property the better the odds of picking up leads and an even better chance that many of your competitors aren't taking advantage of as much property promotion as you are.
The good news is that you don't have to take the time to submit to each and every vendor one at a time. In many instances your MLS already exports properties to these vendors. In other instances your Brokerage might export properties to these vendors and in some cases even the company hosting your website will have vendor relations.
What you should do is ask your MLS, Broker and web hosting company which websites, if any, they export to. Once you have an idea of who they feed to and who they don't feed to you can at that point manually submit to the other vendor websites.
Here is a SMALL list of vendor websites you could possibly be marketing your properties on:
- Trulia
- Zillow
- Yahoo Real Estate
- Google Base
- Backpage
- FrontDoor
- Oodle
- Lycos (Syndicates from Oodle)
- Local.com (Syndicates from Oodle)
- Vast
- Craigslist (No Export, Manual Only)
- HotPads
- DotHomes
- Enormo (International + fee)
- HomeFinder
I'm only one marketing specialist. You as Realtors can probably come up with twice as many places to advertise properties online at that I've possibly never heard of. If you would be so kind and share others in the comments of this post I'll add the vendor website as well as a contribution link to your website or AR profile next to it.
Tomorrow: E-Mail Broadcast Marketing - Realtors
Sincerely,
John F. Jones III
Find me on: Twitter | LinkedIn | Trulia | Active Rain
My Previous Post In This Series: Day Three - Online Property Marketing
Great advice, If you put your listing on Point2nls it will feed your listing to many of those sites and more!
It looks like we need to hire you just to keep the listings we have in all those places.
@Brent,
I knew about Point2 and even Postlets.com but decided to leave those out of the equation sense they are distributors to those places and not really vendors themselves. If a MLS, Broker or web hosting company doesn't feed properties to these vendor sites then yes sites like these two can be used to help out.
@Heath,
I know people who do nothing but what they call property blitz runs. They essentially do what you said you'd have to hire me for. Frankly I'm not that patient with data entry type roles much like this kind of thing is and would rather stick to search engine optimization.
- JJ
Heath- It seems like a lot, but it really does help AND is worth your time. Keeping a high frequency of exposure for each and every listing will ensure the most optimal chance at selling that property and making you money.
-Griffin / SEO / Custom Web Developer / ClearVision Media
I like your blog, very nice of you to post all of the tips...I just started Linked In late last year and Trulia last month. I'll read the reat of your series.....thank you very much!
@Jane Grant,
Thank you for your kind words. I'll be posting my next post in this series at 9am PST. I'm posting two hours later each day to get a feel for when most people might be actively reading blogs on Active Rain.
Here is a good tip for you...
When being active in social communities like Active Rain, Linked In and Trulia it is a good idea to be able to find out rather or not people are talking about you. Google has a nice tool called Google Alerts. This will allow you to have an e-mail alert sent by Google letting you know every time your name is mentioned. While you'll possibly get a few off topic alerts where someone is talking about a different Jane, this is still something you might want to check out.
Have a wonderful day!
No doubt about it - if you aren't syndicating to these site, you are missing a great opportunity. I would have added syndication services that feed to these 3rd party sites like postlets, vflyer and point2agent. I hope you touch on these during your series.