Posted on Friday, March 16th (6250 days ago)

As a realtor, you’re under constant pressure to spend money marketing your listings, especially in a tighter market where dollars are spent more carefully and sellers have lost the â??negotiation edgeâ? they have been enjoying over the last several years.

This leads to more work for you as an agent.  Buyers have more properties to choose from so more time is spent running around showing houses.  Sellers, especially those who purchased in the last few years, still want to list their homes higher than their real value, forcing you to try and convince them of the current market reality vs. their own expectations.

The end result is that you as an agent are expected to advertise more and of course spend more to sell their home.

As a web developer who works with many realtors, those expectations trickle down to me.  The agent who never monitored hist web traffic now has it in the front of his mind.  They ask me how can I get more leads?  Its never a simple answer, especially when an agent is handling a handful of communities, spreading the keywords you would want to be found on across the map more broadly, making it tougher to be found in general.

Meanwhile, a new breed of sites have crept to the top of the search rankings when searching for real estate information.  These site are filled with user-generated content.  Realtors posting their own listings.  Owners posting their own listings.

These sites can be looked at as a problem since they hinder people finding your smaller local site.

These sites can also be looked at as an ally and I believe that is their real intention.  “If you can’t beat them join them” is an old saying and it certainly rings true here.  Face it, you can’t expect to compete with a full staff of web page optimizers who work to continuously build the site’s popularity on a daily basis.

Many of these sites let you post listings for free â?? so what are you waiting for?  Use these directories to your benefit.  Use their top 10 rankings to get more people looking at your listings.  Use their top 10 rankings to link to your own site, increasing the importance of your own site at the same time.

Sites you should try â?? before getting started be aware of a few small caveats that are part of the “free” service.  These usually include creating an account on the site, placing a link back to their site in exchange etc…  My Rating is based on how beneficial I believe the site to be and how often people searching our region would come across them.

Site	Description	My Rating
http://www.house.info	Large classifieds site for US and Canada mostly	***
http://www.glo-con.com	International Real Estate Directory	*
http://www.trulia.com/	US Directory that uses google maps	****
http://base.google.com/	Google’s classified directory	***
http://www.propsmart.com/	Classified directory	**
http://lycos.oodle.com/post/	Lycos classifieds	**
http://www.edgeio.com/	Classified directory	**
http://www.iqrealestate.com/	Real Estate Directory	**

I’m sure there are more that could be added to this list appearing daily on the web, but these site represent the big players in my own local region (New Jersey, USA).

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About Joseph R. B. Taylor

Joseph R. B. Taylor is a humble designer/developer who makes stuff for screens of all shapes and sizes. He is currently the lead UI/UX Architect at MScience, LLC, where he works to create simple experiences on top of large rich datasets for their customers and clients.