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INVENTORY HOME LISTINGS
Syndication: Reach The Global Market
By Jessica Wagner
Now that everyone has heard the statistic time and time again - "94% of
home buyers will use the internet to find their new home", many of us
are left to ponder:
1) Who are they?
2) Where are they looking?
3) And most importantly, how do I reach all of them?
The answers to the first two
questions are simple: 1) Everyone, and 2) Everywhere.
This makes the answer to
question 3 a little more complicated. There are several ways to go
about this, but thankfully there is now one simple way to reach the
internet masses with your inventory home listings. It's a service that
is easy enough for anyone to use and it will barely make a dent in the
marketing budget. But before we get into the details of listings
syndication, let's delve into questions 1 and 2 a little further.
Who are the online
buyers?
Online buyers come in all shapes and sizes. One thing they have in
common is NEED. They are looking to buy and they are taking
matters into their own hands. They are anonymous, thorough and
addicted. They are looking on multiple real estate sites, and they are
saving their favorites. They are well-researched and when they click to
send that email or pick up the phone, you better be ready to sell a
house! And they are not just in the United States. They are in
Ireland, England, France or Italy. They have money to spend and your
home might be just what they want. But do they know it exists?
Where are they looking?
The list is almost endless.
And it is growing every day. There is Trulia, Google Base, Zillow,
Homescape, Vast, Oodle and Lycos, to name a few. These are known as the
"Aggregators". These sites accept real estate listings from
brokers, home sellers and builders alike. Listings can be submitted one
at a time, or in bulk. And the great thing is that most of them are
free! They are the conduit through which listings are fed to world of
home buyers. This presents a tremendous opportunity for anyone with
homes to sell.
According to Compete.com,
the traffic for July 2008 for just 3 of these aggregators was
incredible:
Trulia - 2,365,016 visitors
Zillow - 2,744,227 visitors
Oodle - 2,308,150 visitors
So it seems the answer is
simple. If you want to reach millions of buyers with your listings, you
must publish them on these popular websites. However, for a builder
with multiple homes to post, this would be quite a time-consuming
endeavor, not only to post each home on every site, but to manage,
update and track these home listings would require a team of experts.
Real estate syndication is the solution.
Real Estate
Syndication
Builderfeeds.com
has developed the technology to feed multiple home listings to over 25
different real estate aggregators, including international websites.
And it is very easy to use. For the builder it means uploading listing
information to ONE website and those listings are then fed out across
the internet to millions of buyers searching on their favorite
aggregator website.
This is accomplished with
the use of an XML feed. Builderfeeds.com creates the XML feed
from an Excel file.
This is how it works:
1) Download the Excel spreadsheet template from Builderfeeds.com
2) Input listings into the Excel spreadsheet
3) Upload the Excel spreadsheet to Builderfeeds.com
Once the listings are in the
Builderfeeds system, the builder can log in and view their own listings
within their account and choose where to publish them. They can also
edit the listings one at a time, or in bulk. This allows the builder to
manage their listings and keep the information fresh and current.
Real estate syndication is
helping builders to maximize their exposure and sell homes.
The benefits of the Builderfeeds.com services are plain to see:
-
Save time
-
Reach a global market
-
Build your own website
traffic
-
Increase inbound links
to your website
-
Give your homes maximum
exposure
-
Sell more homes
Builderfeeds.com has opened
up the opportunity for builders to compete with resale listings and also
attract the foreign investors. Go to
Builderfeeds.com
to create your free account and you will be able to look around their
listing management system for yourself. See how easy it is to use! 
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