When you're doing searches for buyers you spend all sorts of time in MLX/S clicking and emailing. That's part of the job. The downside is that sending lots of email to buyers is not always positive. Perhaps some blog technology can help. What's wrong with the current method?
First, we live in a world of too much email as it is. I don't know anyone that wishes they could spend more time deleting/purging/forwarding email. So if you're sending one message for each property, at some point, you will exceed the comfort level of the recipient.
Second, sending email all over the place scatters what you've done. You will not remember what was sent to whom and when, unless you're a machine about documenting your activity log. Because messages are sent from MLX type systems, the only way you can retrace your steps is by including yourself as a CC: which still makes is very clumsy to summarize what work you did for your buyers.
Third, sending email does not help your website appear to be more valuable to search engines. Google will never reward you for sending email at all all hours of the day and night unless you send your new listings ... to your site.
A "listing blogger" might be something to consider. (we think we made up that term, but our apologizies if someone already thought of this and called it the same thing :)
How it works:
Install some blogging software. Which one isn't all that important. The clever part here is that you connect it to a separate/unpublished email account . As you conduct your MLX searches, you email directly to this email account.
Every x minutes, have your blogging software read your secret email account and post what's there.
That's all there is to it!
Now after you have posted a few properties, you email your buyer and send them to your listing blog. They can go there when they have time, so the number of messages you're sending them is reduced -- which elevates the perceived value of each. As you add new properties, they can view them in one place, right along with the rest of the world.
Here's an example of one that we built just to make sure we could do this. (total time to construct this was about 3 hours, because the first one we tried didn't work)
Only thing you might want to consider is copyright issues associated with grabbing data from MLS/X. As long as you're a paying customer, I can't imagine anyone would bark about that, but it's still something I would research before launching this idea.
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