Just thought I would give a little update on our data syndication project. We are currently pumping listings out to www.Point2homes.com , www.Oodle.com , www.Trulia.com , realestate.yahoo.com and base.google.com . Google is kinda broken. It seems that we are the first to send them an XML feed (everyone else is just using flat file). They don’t want us to change but we are getting tired of being the guinea pigs! Anyway, I am sure they will fix it soon and then our solution will rock! They might, and I am not saying they will :), have a new real estate spec coming soon. I would *guess* that it will be awesome!
In any case all these listings go out with our members branding and contact info. In February we generated almost 50,000 leads – all for free to our members. Do the math, if we were selling them at $35.00 a pop like Move.com is going to that would be $1.75 MILLION DOLLARS worth. But as we have said before, these aren’t for sale, they belong to our members.
Incidentally, we are going to blow away this number in March as we are now generating up to 5000 leads per day on our network.
Thought I would leave you with an interesting Oodle URL. I think it is supposed to be a secret but I have friend on the Inside 🙂 This will let you see all our listings by city. Just replace Detroit in the link below with whatever
Oodle calls your city:
http://detroit.oodle.com/browse/-/listing_source_point2/
or
http://charlotte.oodle.com/browse/-/listing_source_point2/
or
http://yourcity.oodle.com/browse/-/listing_source_point2/
Also:
I think I might need a holiday. I had a dream the other night that my nine year old daughter was entering homes for sale in our system. I was getting frustrated with her because she wasn’t putting in enough detail, so I built her a wizard tool that would just ask her questions that she could answer and it would make a fantastic looking listing. Anyone agree that I need a holiday?
Your direction is awesome. The tools are great. I’m a Point2 Professional member. We have some advanced access members in our office that point to their content being better and that their leads inport into Top Producer. Do you have any plans to aim some strategic marketing tools and addons to these folks?
Thanks for the kudos Chris. I hear what you are saying about he content and lead transmission. We are currently making changes that allow us to provide some stock content and “starter” content to our users. I have seen AA’s content and it seems to be framed into their sites and not indexable. In a way this is good because it is all the same on every site. Our content will marked as “no index” but you will be able to mark it indexable if you change it.
We are also making some changes late April to allow for more options on our lead capture forms. We will also allow specific drip campaigns to be attached to a specific form. This should allow for much more targeted campaigns.
As for the lead transmission, I have spoken many times with Top Producer and Errol Samuelson (their Pres). We do intend to integrate what they call “LTS” (lead transmission protocol) into our system. I hope we can get it done for early summer but I wouldn’t want you to hold me to that.