This post has been inspired by featured article writtten by Midori Miller Please take safety precautions when displaying addresses on the net and the following discussion about this issue.
Midori pointed to a danger of increased exposure to criminal activities or unsafety for both agents and clients when address along with the lister's remarks that house is vacant is being displayed on the Internet.
In most cases I get authorization from my sellers to display the address on the Internet. Even more. As a marketer for my clients' properties listed with me, I love the 24/7 exposure of my Internet listings. For example, I aggresively use the marketing potential of single property web sites. I admit, and many of my clients agree with me: these web sites work great.
Here comes the controversy.
When Agencylogic.com started offering individual properties' web sites - powersites, they came with the idea of buying www.123AnyStreet.com-like domains for these sites. Actually, all major providers of single property web sites offer this kind of domain names.
First, I liked this idea. It's easy to remember, easy to advertise in printed media, etc. Then it came time when my first listing, and the other one, and more with theirs personal web sites sold. The question What to do with these sites? needed immediate answer. One of the Agencylogic's ideas was o.k. - offer the site as a gift to the new owner. I even tried this couple times - no real response from the other agents' past clients (that who most of the buyers of my listings in reality are). No real use of this site for new owners, too as I keep and can not pass on all administrative tools for all my sites.
Marketer's greed did not let me just shut these sites off, as they started to be real visible by Google, Yahoo! and other search engines.
However, I made a very tough decision to let most of my first individual property sites go. Why? Because new owners have never authorized my company to use their property address as my company's marketing tool. Because they may not be willing to get 24/7 exposure of their property address on the net! Because I don't want to be sued for unauthorized use of other people's property for my personal, or my company's, or my other clients' listings marketing.
Addresses on the net used as the domain names can become a source of unnecessary litigation.
Now I do it differently and highly recommend my experience to all agents who like using the great advantages of individual property web sites. I buy more generic domain names for my sites, like www.SolonHome.com or www.WaldenFarmsLand.com .
I will write about advantages of using generic names in my next posts.
Have a great selling season and more creative yet safe ideas for marketing on behalf of our clients who sell the houses in Greater Cleveland and other areas.
Sincerely,
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