Well right away I'm sure I grabbed your attention or at least peaked the interest of those who remember what a bad word this was back in the 80's and 90's. I'm referring of course to our "old mindset" that defined syndicator as a some type of "carpet-bagger" that rolled into town and swindled investors into putting up large sums of money to acquire a share or piece of the action in a soon to boom property portfolio. No, that is not what I'm talking about. Funny how definitions change. You know, when a disk was something you threw at the beach and a monitor was the mean kid in the hall who wrote down your name when you were AWOL from class without a pass.
In today's vernacular, syndication refers to broadcasting information across the Internet. No different than a syndicated talk show or sit-com across the cable networks. It is a way for real estate agents, companies or MLS providers to publish real estate listings to online classified web sites. Now, how many of you really knew that? If you did, great job! If not, get educated so that you aren't left behind in the biggest lead generation opportunity to come our way in the last decade!
A recent survey by Classified Intelligence finds that online classified advertising will grow by 32% this year for a total spent of $7.7 Billion dollars. One of the fastest growing segments of online advertising is Real Estate. Savvy agents and informed companies are pushing their real estate listings through the use of RSS feeds, template services and website vendors who offer the service as a part of their listing management tools.
Through these services, real estate listings are pushed to online classified companies such as: google base, oodle, edgeio, craigslist, hotpads, livedeal and backpage. There are several more emerging companies including Zillow that just added an EZ ad template to their website. Zillow's "Mr. Expedia" is set on being the "community" site for real estate. We might as well get used to him and others being around.
Just go to Craigslist.org in any major metro market and search real estate for sale. You'll see that a few enterprising real estate agents have forgone the boring text adds for vibrant templated multi-media ads. How? By utilizing these services, of which some of the easiest to navigate are: Postlets, vflyer and reallyo. The best part is that many of these services are virtually free or can be utilized by heavy usage agents for a nominal monthly subscription fee.
Imagine the leads your company could generate if all of your company's listings could be found on numerous websites across the Internet. Better yet, if a consumer initiated a search by address on any major search engine, several results would be returned with numerous places to get information that would all point back to your website, your agents and your contact information. It's not pie in the sky, it is happening and major companies have already negotiated deals with Trulia, Google base and Zillow to do it on a larger scale.
Perhaps syndication isn't a bad word after all!
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