Let’s say you’re a property management company that deals with individual residential units and multi-family community rentals and asset management. Its property managers and leasing agents manage over 3,000 units and over 400 are available for rent. Your admins, agents, and/or managers spend hours each week manually uploading your listings to MLS, Rentals.com, Apartments.com, Zillow.com, Google Base, Truli, Hotpads.com, and dozens more (or worse, they don’t). ). do this at all). This is time consuming and inefficient in your mind as you would like to see property managers boosting business, increasing your inventory and keeping your landlords and tenants happy. This is a common scenario and I’m going to talk a bit about how you can work to reduce the number of touch points when marketing and advertising listings. This goes for standard real estate brokers too, so real estate agents and brokers, this is for you too!
The first step is to identify where in your systems’ setup of a new listing (Yardi Voyarger, Propertyware, internal system for managing listings) you would like to have as your “source” for all listing information such as property description, business title, address, photos and all other associated information. This is important because it will determine if you will need to hire a developer to integrate with those systems. Some of them provide the built-in ability to extract this type of information, while others do not do so without very expensive vendor support.
The second step is to decide which real estate websites you think are most effective for your listings. For rental listings, I recommend the following websites to syndicate (automatically submit your listings):
syndication
Non-Paid Syndication Partners (Free):
yahoo real estate
google base
Zillow
Truly
scribble
military.com
Walmart Classifieds
backpage.com
local.com
Lycos Classified
Spaces leased (AOL)
classified myspace
CLRS search
hot pads
vast.com
Giant
RentBits
Yakaz
layar
aloqa
Trovit
Twitter – Hotpads
Twitter – Your home account
facebook – doodle
Facebook – Your home account
Paid Syndication Partners:
RentalHomesPlus.com
Rentals.com
In order to automate your rental listings, I recommend using one of three main technologies (though not the only method):
1. PUBLICATION OF HTTP DATA
2.XMLPOST
3. Syndication of third parties
HTTP data publishing and XML publishing require a developer or consultant to build the system for you. There are some advantages to these first two options than “third party syndication” no. #3 it can’t do, like allow you to have aggregate reporting and tracking for all leads. For option #3, I recommend using Realbird.com, a site geared towards real estate agents/brokers that allows you to manually upload your listings and syndicate them to many of the sites I mentioned above for $89/year. Because this requires manual uploading and management of listings (expired, etc.), it leaves something to be desired in terms of efficiency, but will be the least expensive from a direct cost standpoint. After factoring in your employees’ time to manage inventory, you might be surprised at how much it’s costing you and your staff.
Using HTTP or XML data posts to pull your listing data from your management software to your company website, and then syndicate it from there is the ideal method. It allows you to integrate with CRM or lead management software to track all calls, emails and other touch points on your own websites and other websites you don’t own! I’ll have a full blog post on lead management sometime next week, so stay tuned.
Unfortunately, there is no do-it-yourself guide to listing syndication, but it is absolutely possible with the right consultant leading the project. Plan to spend between $10,000 and $50,000 depending on the complexity and nature of the project. This should give you an idea of how to budget. The investment pays off in the long run, especially when you factor in integration with lead management.
Post any questions you may have about your business and I’ll try to answer with details to help point you in the right direction. Until next time.