It used to be that all you had to do was send your listing off to the listing secretary, and it would appear on the MLS later that day, then on IDX and Realtor.com a day or so later. Today, that’s changed. After your listing goes in to the office, within 72 hours, it may show up on as many as 10 different websites, including the three I mentioned above. How? Thorough listing syndication and aggregation (huh??)Over the past few months, I’ve spent quite a bit of time trying to document all the places our listings go, and all of the places that I could post our listings to get more exposure for our sellers. I thought that I would share some of that research with you, and perhaps give you some ideas as to how to market your listings more widely over the net.
Let’s get some terms defined first, then some tips on how you should structure your listings for their initial input. One of the most important things you can do is develop some consistent (and good) habits to follow when you get a new listing to minimize the amount of time you spend entering data.
Simply put, syndicating your listings means that you’re sharing your listings with other websites. One form of syndication that we’re used to is IDX – once you posted a listing on the MLS, it was available to other Realtors and some public search engines. People could go on-line and search the MLS for property. If the site was tied to a Realtor, then that Realtor might get the lead. If it was tied to a public site, then you might get the lead. Here’s a link to Wikipedia’s definition of Web Syndication(for those of you who are technically inclined).
Aggregation is when a website goes out and “looks” at real estate websites for listings to post – in Syndication, listings are “pushed out” to partner sites. In Aggregation, listings are “pulled in” from websites. In the recent past, these two terms have kind of run together, and some of the main sites – like Trulia.com are considered to be aggregation sites, even though most of the listings they post are syndicated to them (confusing, isn’t it!).
If you want to see what I mean, here’s one of our listings that was syndicated out to Trulia.com (incidentally, if you have a buyer…). You can also go to www.Trulia.com, and search for this listing – enter 33131 in the main field, and put the price range between 300,000 and 310,000. There are a couple of things to note: first, you’ll see that this particular listing was syndicated from ewm.com. second, if you click the more info link, you’ll end up on the listing’s page on ewm.com.
If you’ve not been updating the EWM page with additional text and photos, you need to start doing that with your current listings, because as more listings are syndicated out to more sites, having as much information as possible will become more and more important.
Here are some suggestions for a new listing process to follow to take advantage of the syndication sites you’ll be on:
- When you fill out the mls input sheet, get as much information as you can, and fill anything and everything out as completely as you can. When the listing secretary enters the info, get to that listing and verify it’s correct as soon as you possibly can – the same day as it’s entered, if possible (listings usually syndicate out every evening).
- Make SURE that one of the fields you fill out is the Internet Remarks field – that field is what shows up on the IDX posting. In many cases, the field is left empty, and the only thing that gets entered is a period, so that it’s picked up by IDX. If you’re not entering info in that field, then your IDX listings are empty.
- Here’s what I do: When I get a new listing, I sit down with my word processor, and write a full description of about 1,000 characters. From that, I create the other descriptions I need, which are: about 500 characters for MLX, about 140 characters for IDX, and about 200 – 300 characters for other sites that I post to. I also create some kind of theme or title for the listing – in some cases, you can post a title that becomes the headline for the site.
- If you use Word, you can count the number of characters in your text by highlighting the paragraph you’re working on, then clicking the word count option. In Word 2003, it’s on the Tools Menu – Tools | Word Count, then check character count (with spaces). In the new version of Word, it’s on the status bar at the bottom of the screen – click the Word Count and the full counts will appear.
- Save what you’ve written to a file, or e-mail it to yourself. You can copy and paste the text as you need it to the various sites you’ll be posting to.
That’s all for today – last word is the sites your listing will appear on:
MLXchange
IDX (FloridaLiving.net)
I’ll be back in a day or so with more!
-Bob Galivan
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