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No more syndication of listings here.

By
Real Estate Agent with Sky Realty South Austin

As of today, the Sky Realty in Austin group is no longer syndicating our listings thru sites that are just to market advertising, we feel these sites are not beneficial to our agents, our homeowners or our prospecitve buyers.  The sites are primarily to make money thru advertising and are not search engine sites that promote real estate.  These sites do not carry a fiduicary responsibility to buyers or sellers.

The blog post and new position of one Austin Texas real estate company can be read here.  Regardless of what the NAR committee outcome is on Thursday with advice of Google as a Scraper Site vs Search Engine we are going to adhere to maintaining our listings and giving pertinent buyer and seller information on Real Estate sites such as our own websites, other realtor websites, Board of Realtor sites.

Posted by

South Austin Real Estate

Comments (7)

Lenn Harley
Lenn Harley, Homefinders.com, MD & VA Homes and Real Estate - Leesburg, VA
Real Estate Broker - Virginia & Maryland

GOOD FOR YOU.  With 90% of sales coming from Co-Ops in the MLS, buyer contacts coming from our IDX sites, we don't really need the rest. 

They are all fringe and, while a lot of agents have sold sellers on the value of these fringe sites, they can't match the production of the MLS and IDX sites.

IMO, of course.

Most of the sites have "no follow" tags so you don't even get any Google juice for your web sites. 

 

May 12, 2009 06:20 AM
South Austin Real Estate Blog
Sky Realty South Austin - Austin, TX

Lenn, thanks for your recognition of our stance.  It's time we stopped feeding the hand that bites us.

May 12, 2009 06:29 AM
Allison Stewart
St.Cloud Homes - Saint Cloud, FL
St. Cloud Fl Realtor, Osceola County Real Estate 407-616-9904

I agree Gail.   I do not that value of many of these fringe sites- in fact most have erroneous information.

May 12, 2009 07:20 AM
Jason Crouch
Austin Texas Homes, LLC - Austin, TX
Broker - Austin Texas Real Estate (512-796-7653)

Gail - It sounds admirable, but I must admit that I have no idea which types of sites would fall under this boycott.  Could you give an example of one?  I gathered that this was not IDX.

May 12, 2009 08:12 AM
South Austin Real Estate Blog
Sky Realty South Austin - Austin, TX

Florida...I agree, the erroneous information is astounding and unfortunately the public consumer is fed it constantly ... the local realtor would be a much better resource for buyers and sellers.

Jason..   If you read Curtis' blog post today on our Sky site ,..link below...  you will see he specifically talks about Trulia, Zillow, Oodle and there are many others, I know I will disable my syndication listings from my point2nls website also. 

    http://www.skyrealtyaustin.com/blog/why-we-no-longer-syndicate-our-listings.html

  We are quite concerned about NAR defining google as a scraper site not a search engine and all the while allowing Trulia and zillow search engine status, which they are not.  (if Google is not a search engine, then neither is Yahoo, MSN or many others) we see this as a limiting factor to agents

May 12, 2009 08:38 AM
Jason Crouch
Austin Texas Homes, LLC - Austin, TX
Broker - Austin Texas Real Estate (512-796-7653)

Gail - I did read that post from your link in this post previously, but I noticed that Curtis didn't specifically mention any sites by name.  Maybe he should do that to make it more clear?  Just a suggestion -

May 12, 2009 08:59 AM
Betina Foreman
WJK Realty - Austin, TX
Realtor, C.N.E., with WJK REALTY

Dear Gail,

This is very interesting. Thanks for the links to Curtis's post. I will have to check this out in more detail.  Can I assume the sites you are referring to are Zillow, Trulia, CyberHomes and a multitude of others?

:)

 

May 14, 2009 02:58 AM