In the case of the real estate agent, Big Brother is your friendly Search Engine; the most popular of which is good ole Google.  

When writing articles and community information for your website, be sure that your content is fresh and unique. The large search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN filter your pages when looking to rate your site. These filters look for content that appears to be duplicated from other website pages. If the search engine finds content which they determine to be duplicated, your site will receive a "duplicate content penalty" lowering your website ranking. The search engines, as yet, cannot determine which site has the original content.  Search engines can only determine that more than one website has several sentences, paragraphs or entire content that appears to be the same.  

So, a word of caution when you are writing pages to be posted on your site: be sure all content is distinctive and unique.  

Most real estate professionals prefer spending their time doing what they do best; meeting with potential clients and customers, assisting them to a successful close of escrow (and collecting their pay for doing a job "well done") rather than writing website content with the added task of making sure that the wording they have used does not appear somewhere else on the web.  

Once again I suggest using a Virtual Assistant to do the job for you. A good Virtual Assistant will write relevant and informative articles for you and make sure that the content is unique to your website.  

If you are considering the advantages of a Virtual Assistant, feel free to contact me for a personal consultation. The services at Second Self Virtual Assistance are customized to meet the needs and desires of each individual agent we serve.