List of Vendors / Apps that help Realtors streamline posting on Craigslist and other listing sites

Posted by Pat Kitano at 10/15/2006 6:40 PM
Categories: Technology, New Business Models, How-To's, Cool Web Tools





Before the "internet", the best example of real time data distribution services existed in the PR wire industry where "one fax" got your press release wired to all the news agencies. The internet and the blogosphere are now rife with aggregation services, from multiple resume posting to mass search engine submissions to Pingoat -like automated pinging services.

Now, Realtors are being faced with the same data distribution issues for posting to various home listing websites with no obvious integrated solutions beyond MLS scraping.

Like many ongoing posters of ads to Craigslist, I find spending 10 minutes cutting and pasting an ad for Craigslist publication every week complete and utter tedium - a duty I always want to put off and often do. I can imagine what agents who may have to compose extensively with images for their housing ads must go through. And then to repeat the process with their IDX site, Yahoo Real Estate, Google Base, etc.

Here's a list of companies and applications that make Craigslist and their ilk easier to use... (caveat - I have not used any of these services and am circulating this data to show these useful business concepts exist. I'd be pleased to hear about their efficacy if anyone toftt)

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Listpic  - such a simple application that screen scrapes the photos off any Craigslist topic in any Craiglist region, and compiles only those listings with pictures into a easy to look at grid. The truth is most home buyers and renters will only look at CL postings with pics on it anyway. Try it, the pictures are captioned and scale from thumbnails to fitting three columns. Awesome... the missing feature is the user can't perform a search on a topic to drill down on their target home criteria, but the captions show the location so it still works.
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I was searching for CL templates because posting housing ads on CL's inflexible ad building application is a chore. Compurealty Publishing, a subsidiary of a New York based real estate internet services company Compurealty, provides a CL tool that claims ads will look something like this. They also purport to have a service providing daily updates to CL, Yahoo RE and GoogleBase Classifieds for $24.95 / month. Frankly, I did try using their CL template tool and there is so much data an agent needs to input into application fields to produce a complete ad, it may tend to be frustrating.
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Zinglister is a service that automates the publishing of listings in any area of CL and charges about $1 per post per day. I can imagine how they came up with their pricing model... one ad = 3 minutes, 20 ads = 60 minutes, one college student inputting 20 ads from home = $12/hour...
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Rentmarketer is the only service I've identified so far that takes the PRWire model of mass multiple postings and distributes rental listings to a set of national rental property sites, for $89 per property. Simple enough... Here's the list of rental sites, a good list to have on hand:

Rentvine
ThisProperty.com
ApartmentFrog.com
RentalSource.com
USRentalListings.com
Sublet.com
Craigslist.com
Rentfinders.net
Google Base
HotPads.com
oodle.com
PropSmart.com
edgeio.com
LiveDeal.com
BackPage.com
Rentals.com
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 Rentslicer is an easy-to-use mashup of San Francisco rentals by neighborhood that screen scrapes Craig's List rental ads in real time. The scrape includes the rental ad's time of posting, thus allowing prospective renters to "pounce" on the ad as soon as it posts. Even better, alerts can be created to monitor desired rental opportunities. Looks like a lot of mashup sites are popping up in this space - HousingMaps shows rental, sales and sublet data, but doesn't have the alert features or rental trend analysis Rentslicer has, Bogozo looks suspiciously similar to HousingMaps but hasn't been updated for about 20 days. HomePriceMaps mashup scrapes CL's properties for sale.
 --------------------

Finally, here's the ultimate Real Estate Mashup list from a serious mashup blog.


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  • 10/15/2006 8:31 PM Dave Dugdale wrote:
    Good post.

    I think RentMarketer has a very interesting business model. Some large property managers have to hire someone full time to enter all their units into all these sites, you can see how RentMarketer can save them that salary.

    Dave
    RentVine
    Reply to this

  • 10/16/2006 5:07 AM teresa boardman wrote:
    Now heres some info I can use! i am really sick of pasting my listings into Craig's every week. Some of the sites I was posting to are now picking up my listings via RSS which helps. I am getting concerned about all of these sites that have some of the listings on them. Will the consumer be confused?
    Reply to this

  • 10/16/2006 10:34 AM Dave Dugdale wrote:
    Teresa,

    I don't think that users will get confused, if anything I have some clients that say it helps them brand their company.

    The real issue to consider is what search engines call duplicate content (which they don't like). I have not looked at this issue enough to say if this is a problem.

    Dave
    RentVine
    Reply to this

  • 10/16/2006 11:17 AM Jim Duncan wrote:
    I have been quite pleased with http://www.postlets.com for a couple of weeks now. And, for a free service, they answered my request for help very, very quickly.

    --Jim
    Reply to this
    1. 10/16/2006 6:41 PM Maureen Francis wrote:
      I ditto the postlets suggestion from Jim. It syndicates to numerous sites in addition to Craigslist, and can be resubmitted easily (once you've built it...)
      Reply to this
      1. 10/17/2006 5:33 AM P Kitano wrote:
        Thanks for the suggestion Jim, I'll look into postlets

        Reply to this


      2. 10/17/2006 10:11 AM P Kitano wrote:
        Postlets has competition from Vflyer - Jim's post here.

        Reply to this






  • 10/20/2006 1:29 PM Condo Blog wrote:
    Hey Pat we are really enjoying your blog and are a huge believe in the future of a transparent real estate marketplace. We would love to become more involved. Possibly a blogroll to start? Thx, The Condo Blog
    Reply to this
    1. 10/20/2006 2:17 PM P Kitano wrote:
      Thanks Condo guys... blogroll - of course! You've been on my feedlist since I started and I always enjoy your commentary... your kind comment prompted me to look further past your blog... to your business CondoDomain.com.  As you may know, I'm a new business model enthusiast and I like your focus on condos in a clean web design. For San Francisco's condos, I wish your site could list all the condo developments in SOMA, the area of greatest condo activity. I'll introduce you to Melanie at Condo Contessa who excels as a Realtor of SOMA and other SF condos... she might be helpful in developing your listings in SF.



      Reply to this






  • 10/27/2006 10:12 AM Larry Cragun wrote:
    You are truly becoming the GURU of what is going on technically in real esate blogging. Lar
    Reply to this
    1. 10/27/2006 8:29 PM P Kitano wrote:
      Thx Lar... there are so many gurus - I learn so much from Mary, Joel, Jason, Mike, and you, just to name only a few...

      --pk

      Reply to this






  • 10/30/2006 9:21 AM Barry Hurd wrote:
    I think you folks have hit it on the dot. I just got back from the Blog Business Summit in Seattle where we found our company to be the only one currently offering a real estate solution using blogging. The multiple inputs on Craigslists, Yahoo, and Google are slowly fading away as RSS and blogging tech penetrates deeper into the industry. Our goal is to resolve some of the duplication agents need to go through using so many different systems, while at the same time getting certain pieces of tech working in favor of the industry. Right now, it seems most of the tech involves is working against it.

    To answer a question- RSS feeds and listings that duplicate information from catalog style sites are usually 'set aside' by Google. They don't attract a huge amount of points either way.

    -If any of you happen to attend NAR in two weeks, come on by our booth and introduce yourselves.
    Reply to this

  • 8/28/2007 8:31 AM Dave Dugdale wrote:
    RentClicks is no longer around if you want to delete that off your list.
    Reply to this
    1. 8/28/2007 4:52 PM Pat Kitano wrote:
      Thanks Dave, will delete... always amazed when someone mentions an older article... proof that blog content is a bit like a library

      Reply to this
      1. 12/2/2007 8:14 AM Dave Dugdale wrote:
        Pat,

        Also HomeRentalAds.com is not around anymore either.

        Is there anyway you can add my site to your list above? My rental site has seen a lot of growth in 2007.
        Reply to this





  • 3/17/2008 10:05 PM Atilla C. wrote:
    Pat,

    Here is a great mashup with google maps.

    http://www.housingbymap.com

    I think this is much better than looking at boring cl lists, plus you can easily geo-target your house/rental/roommate search. No fee for map ads...

    Best,

    -Atilla
    Reply to this












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