Listing syndication is the publication of your listings and their details and images in various other real estate portals and websites. This increases the number of "impressions," how many times your listing is exposed to potential buyers out there. It's also considered by many real estate professionals to be a logical and necessary enhancement of their services to listing clients.
Wouldn't it be great if we real estate professionals could meet with a seller, get the details for their home, call up a buyer, and write up a contract all in a day or two? It's happened, but you can starve to death if you take the minimalist approach to marketing your listings. Or, how about putting website SEO above the seller client's interests? Believe it or not, I knew one real estate agent who would only place links at various places around the Web for listings. They always wanted the links pointing to their website for better SEO, forcing potential buyers to click the link and come to the site to get the details of the listing ... Duh!
Let's just agree that you're reading this because you realize that you want to place information and photographs of your listings on various high traffic sites around the Internet in order to get your listing in front of as many buyers' eyes as possible. Before sites like Trulia.com and Zillow.com, the only place to go was Realtor.com, and we had it really easy. Realtors' listings were automatically posted there through a data feed from the local MLS. Well, we all know how that advantage has been eroded.
Today, whether we like it or not, sites like Zillow.com and Trulia.com get a huge amount of listing search activity. Compete.com provided the graph on the left for December 2011 real estate website traffic. This is the number of unique visitors in millions that month.
Notice that Realtor.com is down in third place behind Yahoo and Zillow. Yahoo has an arrangement with Zillow.com for listings, so there is probably overlap there, though it's not clear from the marketing material on the Yahoo site how it works.
The point is that having that automatic feed and listing display on Realtor.com alone is no longer enough. You must get more exposure, as many visitors are only using one or two of these resources and you could be missing those if you're not everywhere you can be.
The good news is that you don't have to physically go over to Trulia and Zillow and enter the listing data and upload images for every one of your listings individually. RealtySoft has a syndication setting that automatically integrates with these popular sites and others, and your listing gets posted on these very popular sites within a day or two of you publishing it on your website.
It's as simple as going to the MyListings area and checking off the sites that you want your listing to go to, and it's taken care of for you.
You can impress your seller with all of that REALY HARD WORK you did in getting their home displayed on these sites (That's called marketing your amazing services.) And, all of these sites are still providing some links back to yours as well. It's a win-win for you and your client.
Local versus Global with Craigslist
This RealtySoft syndication service is super, and it's also global. You're all over the world very quickly. However, what about that local buyer, one who may not be using those sites, but is driving around and using Craigslist for a more local search of homes for sale?
It's not a problem with RealtySoft, as you're going to be presented with the code to place a nice qraphic listing on your local Craigslist site. Forget all of the HTML stuff, and how to make sure that the listing displays properly. Just enter all of your listing data and upload photos and publish your listing on your RealtySoft site. Then, get the Craigslist code and post it on Craigslist for a high impact listing that will bring you buyer leads.
And it looks great on Craigslist!
And more below this:
There are multiple photos I haven't shown here. And, below the listing info there is a large agent photo, brokerage logo, and all contact information. And all of this from just a copy and paste!
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