Many realtors these days are struggling with the technicalities or lack of time when submitting their real estate listings to Trulia, Zillow, Oodle, Google or Craigslist. These websites are among the most important companies when it comes to online classifieds, but it can be very frustrating and time consuming to sign up for all of them in order to submit your listings.
One of our previously articles showed you how to create a beautiful Craigslist listing, but at the time, there was no automated option that will help you submit your listing to the appropriate websites. Fortunately, the process has been simplified tremendously since then and many websites, beside Postlets, come to your rescue.
Today, we’ll focus on a fairly new company that offers free and paid flyer design services. FlyerCafe uses the same concept as Postlets, but much simplified. From the moment you sign up to the time I created and published my first listing, it took only three minutes. To make this process as smooth, fast and painless as possible, make sure you have all the information you need about your property, along with the photos.
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As homes stay on the market longer and longer, with more and more of them for buyers to choose from, a growing number of agents aren’t merely getting property details into the Realtor multiple-listing system and hoping for the best. All the technological advances made during the housing boom years - when a low-tech “for sale” sign seemed to be enough - are really being put to use now.
Many realtors decided to focus their attention on real estate blogs or social networking sites. One good example is Facebook which seems to be a very popular advertising method.
Video walk-throughs of homes are also more common - in part thanks to YouTube, which makes it easier to upload the finished product and put it on other sites. If you haven’t tried this, then you really don’t know what you’re missing. The youtube’s users base is extremely large and it is perfect for marketing purposes.
Here is an interesting article that talks about the Realty Market going high-tech
Facebook recently added the ability for anyone to create flyers which is accessible under the advertise link at the bottom of any Facebook page. After creating the flyer, the first thing anyone should do is to check out the cost per impression(CPM). Basically, your flier gets served up in the inventory for the targeted network of your choice.
It kinda works this way:
-if you buy 10,000 fliers in 5 locations over seven days, the flier will be seen in each city 2000 times a day for the full week.
The full cost for this will be $140, not bad at all for that much exposure.
If you have launched a new business, brokerage or a new real estate site, then you could advertise it this way for example.
Here is an example on how Facebook helped increase traffic on a blog.
Rod Boothby from SocialMediaToday.com
Trulia really didn’t show much love to the realtors. Instead the brokers receive most of the attention and tools to market their business. Trulia had offered very little marketing tools to the real estate agents, of course, Trulia Voices is a wonderful way to communicate with potential buyers or sellers but most of the people that visit trulia.com are interested in one thing: to buy properties. Recently they have decided to change that.
With the release of Agent Featured Listings, real estate agents can brand their listings. Even though this first release lacks many other functionalities, it’s a start and at least now all the realtors have the options to add a photo and contact information to their listings.
Agents will have access to a self-service tool to highlight up to 10 listings per month for a monthly subscription fee of $50. For less than the price of a typical newspaper classified ad, agents can now highlight their listings and connect directly to more than 2 million unique users per month.
More information from Trulia’s Blog
A week ago, Vflyer has launched a service called WatermarkPlus. The service lets you add you own graphics to any image you upload to the site. You can add graphic and text elements to your pictures using an easy 3-step process. The nice part is that no registration is required, just upload the picture, choose the style of watermark you want, save the photo and impress your client with the new marketing skills you have just acquired.
The idea behind this application? Vflyer says:
“Watermark Plus is an image enhancing service offered as part of vFlyer that allows users to merchandize and enhance photos and images by adding text, graphics, logos and watermarks to them - quickly and easily. The service allows online sellers to:
- Protect photos by adding visible watermarks and logos
- Enhance photos to attract interest from buyers by adding sales, product and pricing information
- Brand photos and include contact information by adding company logos or personal photographs”
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Hotpads.com is back with a slightly different design. The site has not changed all that much and the interface is still a little too cartoony for my tastes. The icons, while visually interesting, consume way too much screen real estate on a map search and make the search experience a little clumsy in my opinion.
Here’s a full list of the new features from their press release:
* New HotPads Maps
* Microsoft Satellite Mapping Integration
* Neighborhood and City Demographic and Housing Stats with Wikipedia
* Articles
* Political Party Affiliation Mapping
* Demographic and Housing Heat Maps
* Points of Interest Mapping including Schools, Universities and Public
* Transportation
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Zillow.com has launched ‘Zillow EZ Ads’, a self-service way for agents, other professionals and home sellers to buy ads on Zillow map pages for specific ZIP code searches. In case you missed my previous articles on Zillow, here is a short summary: Zillow.com is an online real estate service dedicated to helping you get an edge in real estate by providing you with valuable tools and information.
Here is a screenshot with an ad displayed
The pricing is fairly cheap and for the amount of traffic that Zillow has, it is definitely worth a try. Basically their pricing schemes works as follows: They charge $1 per hundred views, so 1 penny for each view. There is a $10 minimum purchase requirement , no additional fees or taxes.
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Neighboroo has added new features to their website yesterday. The new release has a design improvement as well. With these new updates, Neighboroo adds property data (sales prices, real estate values) from Trulia, real time market activity from Altos Research and neighborhood video from Turnhere..
The real estate map provided by them is very complex, a lot of useful information are presented and pretty easy to navigate through.
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vFlyer, the classified listings service, released a new widget service to its members today that allow you to take your v-Flyer-hosted listings with you anywhere, including your blog.
vFlyer’s widget editor lets you customize either horizontal or vertical galleries, or if you have lots of listings you can create a scrolling display of images. You can choose to create either Flash or JavaScript widgets and vFlyer churns out the necessary HTML code to let you post it on your own website, a blog, social networks or online marketplaces.
vFlyer currently lets you post up to 10 active flyers for free. Premium plan start at $19.95/month after that.
This is a great tool for anyone that would like to transform their blog into a real estate portal or a social networking solution.
Trulia announced two days that it has closed a deal with Realogy Corporation, the parent company of Century 21, Coldwell Banker and ERA, to upload more than 500,000 of its affiliates’ listings to its database. Realogy also has inked a similar deal with Google Base.
Consumers will now be able to easily search and find their dream home on Trulia.com from top brokerage brands including Coldwell Banker®, ERA©, CENTURY 21® and NRT Inc. (a Realogy subsidiary), and then be directed to the complete property information on their respective Web sites. Realogy brands are involved in every third residential transaction in the U.S.
Realogy’s decision to work with Trulia is another positive sign that real estate franchisors and brokerages are embracing the opportunity to reach home buyers where they are searching online, offering scalable marketing solutions like Trulia.com where they receive the benefit of free traffic with no effort on the part of their franchisees or agents.
