I hear agents fuss a lot about the way their listings are being viewed all over the web. I don't mean listings that are sent by aggregate to all of the various Yahoos, Zillow's, Trilia's and others. I mean, I hear a lot of fussing going on when an agent pulls up another agent's website, particularly when it's a different real estate company, and there is the picture of their new listing, with the address, maybe a short description, and the price. Somtimes there will be an MLS number. In Charlottesville, we can do this. I think most Boards of Realtors are allowing this today, aren't they?
Here's an example. This agent does a great job, in my opinion, These and the other 35 or so listed on her website page are all listings belonging to other agents.
There are rules that agents need to follow, of course. IDX is the key; the IDX feeds the information out to the web from the MLS, allowing reciprocating brokers to post any and all active listings on their website (see CAVEAT below), as long as they have it in writing on their site that the listings are provided by, in our case, the Charlottesville Area Association of Realtors through IDX. When a visitor clicks on the listing, they will be taken to a detail of the listing, and THERE, there needs to be attribtuion for the listing. But, it doesn't need to say much. It just needs to say something like "property details courtesy of XYZ Real Estate Company". There is no linking to the listing company, much less the agent, required.
Whether listing agents like or not, the rules are the rules. Some agents do a bang up job with this, they really take advantage of their ability to get the public to pick up the phone and call them on a property they've seen on their website (rather than having to find the listing on the listing agent's website). Not all agents do it well, of course. I'm offended by the look of some websites, they are a big mess of information. It probably works just fine for those agents; I just don't like them. We have a couple of farms & estates agents in our area that really have it down pat; good for them!
So, what's the point of this message? I was having some trouble getting the email function at our MLS to work properly, i.e. I couldn't get the list of properties emailed to a client. So, I worked around it... In our system, you can create searches of all sorts of things, and the IDX will save that search to a specific URL. You can then copy the URL and always get the current results for the search. I made my "search criteria" the 7 MLS numbers for the properties I want to show this client, but LO AND BEHOLD, only 6 properties show up when I go to that URL. The reason?
The CAVEAT: When inputting a listing, the agent is asked if they want the property to participate in the IDX/MLS Exchange. I cannot imagine NOT wanting to participate, but I found an agent (a high profile agent, too.. though not high profile on the web) who chooses the NO option. YES, she keeps her listings off of other agent's websites, but she ALSO KEEPS IT OUT OF SIGHT whenever a prospective buyer is on our local Board's public search website AND from the searches being done on any other websites out there.
Okay, that's her business, I guess.
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