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How does your house get on these sites? Does your agent have to physically go and put your house and photos on it or does it just go on when it hits the MLS? What about other websites? What ones should my house be on? Is there a cost associated with it being on other sites?
It does go on Realtor.com automatically when it hits the mls. Most of the other sites, your realtor has to manually add. You should at a bare minimum add your site to Craigs List, Kijiji, Zillow, Trulia, FrontPage. There are many more, but these are definite places to add. If you have any more questions or need any more help, you may contact me.
In Florida the Florida Association of Realtor is the clearing house for distribution of public access. Realtor.com will receive a data feed directly from FAR. Each state handles the distribution differently. Some brokers can opt out of having their listings displayed on public internet sites. Some MLS have options as to what information is displayed. My MLS allows the broker to select whether to display address, square footage, age of the house, and agent remarks when the listing is displayed on publicly accessible websites.
Agents can chose to pay for enhanced listings on Realtor.com. There are many sites that your agent can add your listing, HOMES.com, homepages.com,googlebase,yahoo realestate, zillow, trulia, as well as blogging sites like activerain, realestate webmasters.
One note: Realtor.com aggregates listings from almost all of the MLSs across the country (not ALL!) however that just gets you represented there in the most basic (searchable) form. Some Realtors will pay for additional showcase and featured packages which allow them to upgrade and add pictures, descriptions, virtual tours...etc.
When my listing are input into the MLS they are they automatically uploaded to a dozen or more websites including realtor.com of course but also nytimes.com, wsj.com (Wall Street Journals site) and others.
I then put them in other sites myself. For higher end listings I go with the Dupont Registry.
Realtor.com gets information on my listings from my MLS. My broker, however, pays for enhanced listings and we add more photos and more words. Our listings also automatically appear on a variety of sites such as the ones Mike mentioned above.
I also use a variety of websites (vflyer, Real Estate Shows, Lands of Texas, etc.) that automatically post to even more websites. Plus I put listings on websites that I feel are most appropriate to the listings (Cowboy.com as an example for a ranch property).
Most of these are sites that the agent pays to list on. Craigslist is a site that is free, and I use it, as well, using flyers provided by the first two above to stand out a bit from the crowd.
I used to keep count of all the sites that my listings appear on, but stopped counting at 50.
Your agent should be doing your marketing. If you have suggestions for places you'd like to see your house listed, by all means, let them know.
FWIW my favorite local broker tells me he gets more (serious) inquiries from Craigslist than he does from ads in the local big daily newspaper. He's considering dropping all newspaper advertising, and going "all internet," so to speak.
FWIW my favorite local broker tells me he gets more (serious) inquiries from Craigslist than he does from ads in the local big daily newspaper. He's considering dropping all newspaper advertising, and going "all internet," so to speak.
CL isn't huge in Salem, but it makes up 5-8% of my inquiries about properties. I've been all internet for two years and have not missed print one bit. I tracked everything for a long time and got almost nothing from my print ads. He should step into Web 2.0.
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