REALTOR Dedicated Listing URL's

I spent some time over the weekend looking at the myriad of tools that you can use to drive your real estate business. Obviously, the RedX is my favorite for listing leads, but there are a few others that look intriguing; especially in their use of multiple technology platforms to generate interest. For quite a while, REALTORS have been using dedicated listing sites to showcase their listings. Although these are fantastic marketing tools and a great closer for listing presentations, the previous versions of the technology have looked pretty bad.

I think I found a tool this weekend that both looks professional, but also leverages some useful technologies, including SMS text, to showcase a property under its dedicated URL (usually the address of the home, i.e. 1388-my-street.com.) The service is Single Property Sites and what they offer is dedicated website for every listing that you want to feature, along with a few widgets and tools to get traffic to those listings.

Now the benefit of this service is not that you just get a dedicated URL. Let’s face it, you could register the URL and create a dedicated listing site on your own. The actual benefit is in the promotion tools and widgets that are included with the service. In addition to a professional-looking, properly branded web site that features your listing, you also get a number of social tools including a google maps widget, a listing graphic widget for your blog and site and a few others. The system also has a SMS interface so that prospects can property details on their phones, and finally, it includes an interface with Craigslist so that you can post your listing details, in different online ad sites. Here is their URL, www.singlepropertysites.com

Real Estate Country and Bing

I haven’t quite formed my opinion about Microsoft’s new release of their Bing search engine. In reading the reviews, I am not alone. I have spent a little time this afternoon trying to get a feel for what where my real estate listing lead site and associated links lay in the ranking. What I found is that this “because it’s not google” search alternative has a completely different algorithm which will likely require a completely different SEO strategy for your real estate website.

I am not sure if this new search engine will give google a run for its money in search engine terms. As Seth Godin put it, “Bing is trying to be the new Google. Unfortunately Google is the new Google.” However, it does have some interesting features.

Now for those of us who are trying to get our real estate website to the top of the ranking, optimizing for bing may require a different strategy. In fact, in looking up the search terms that index my site well on google, I there is little success on bing. The Expired Listing Lead term did return back my link to the RedX as the top link, but the multitude of other sites that typically show up in reference to me did not. For my Agent Online experiment, the site was not even indexed, and similar to google, real estate country did not return a link to my page, even when I typed in the exact URL. Even my wife’s’ “prenatal vitamins” page did not get indexed.

From what I can determine with the very limited experience that I have had with the site, it uses an algorithm similar to google’s but puts a high weight on sites that have been around a while along with those that are well linked. Unfortunately from an SEO standpoint there is not much that you can do to age your real estate URL.