Real Estate Shows Takes on vFlyer and Others
Real Estate Shows, the online virtual tour provider, recently launched new features of their platform which now includes the ability to create a ‘flyer’ of any of your listings. You can see an example on their site (see New Construction In Woodland Hills!).
I’m a fan of the Real Estate Shows (RES) product even though I’m not personally that fond of the slideshow type presentations it generates - I prefer video tours myself, but that’s just my bag. That said, the RES platform makes it quick and easy for Realtors to create a slick looking presentation that is miles above the whirl-around-til-I-puke 360 tour. That, in of itself, is a win - the more Realtors abandoning that ancient technology the better, in my books.
RES’ new flyers are a significant change in strategy for the company however, and now lines them squarely up against another popular web-based marketing solution, vFlyer - both of whom are gunning for the single property website providers. If I were in that business I’d be worried or busy innovating.
It’s not too much of a stretch to see RES eventually offering Realtors the option to buy unique URLs (123MainSt.com for example) for any of the flyers they generate. In fact, it’s a probably a pretty logical step and an easy secondary revenue stream for them (reselling domain registrations).
I’ve long been a fan of single property websites in certain circumstances (see Do Single Property Websites Sell Homes?) and with today’s challenging market, any step a Realtor can take to differentiate themself in a listing presentation or help move a property should be looked at. Oliver Muoto from vFlyer recently penned a great piece on Single Property Sites - Dispelling the Myths and Embracing the Benefits - that I would encourage anyone who is still on the fence to read.
The bottom line here is that, with a very minimal investment, Realtors have the ability to reclaim virtual ownership of their listings - whose sole existence online to date likely lies buried in an IDX feed. Solutions from vFlyer or RES make it easy to re-purpose existing content (listing description, photos, etc.) into a quick and simple web presence for all your listings.
So rather than your listings feeding leads to a broker’s e-Team, with a smart syndication strategy (both RES and vFlyer allow you to push listings out to Google Base, Oodle, Edgeio and others), single property web sites (or ‘flyers’) can help steer any web traffic (read curious buyers) directly to your inbox.
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7 Comment(s)
2 Trackback(s)
- From Does Real Video Rule For You Too? | Future of Real Estate and Loans | Aug 28, 2007
- From Der Makler | Aug 28, 2007
HomeInput | Aug 27, 2007 | Reply
Great point! Especially with the large inventory of homes on the market now, any edge an Agent can get they should take. I’m also interested in checking out the features that vFlyer and RES have to see if they would be a good fit for my site.
MyProperty | Aug 28, 2007 | Reply
Good one. Agents must realise the conveniences that information technology has brought to us. In order to get ahead of everyone , innovative should be palying a crucial role.
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To your success
John Schroeder | Aug 28, 2007 | Reply
Joel,
I totally agree that REALTORS should be utilizing single listing websites. When you look at it from a ROI point of view it just makes sense. Though my latest video listing totally dominates any search for the address having one domain containing all of the property information online can be very useful.
GoogleGiggle | Aug 29, 2007 | Reply
Quite biased, what you wrote here. Mentioning only vflyer and Real Estate Shows leaves out much better single property website tools - hard to believe that you don’t know the other 10 or so major competitors in this field.
RealBird.com | Aug 29, 2007 | Reply
Hello Joel,
Good post again. We are in the same business as RES (but we are making money on other products) and we decided to innovate rather than worry
We have just released, what I believe, the industry’s most comprehensive website analytics tools for real estate professionals. RealBird members can now integrate Clicky, Google Analytics and MyBlogLog in their property website for real-time stats, detailed reports and social networking around their properties (respectively) One of the little covered topics of online listing marketing is the fact that one has to have tools to run Trial and Fail tests. The promise of online listing marketing is that one can test different methods and based on the results decide where to spend the resources (time and cash) to optimize the performance. Without major investment, risk and expertise. This is now all available for real estate agents via the newly released web analytics tool set of RealBird.
See our write up at http://realbird.typepad.com
The single property website service business is not a zero sum game at this point. We have several clients who are using our services and our “competition’s” as well. We have clients who mash up their RES VT with the RealBird listing website. I suspect segmentation at this point, just like with regular real estate websites and maybe consolidation at some point.
There is nothing revolutionary in the single property website concept in itself. It’s a website focusing on the listing, rather than the sales person. Innovation is happening in the real estate business process, that is, letting the listing information go and promoting it as much as possible (rss, SEO, syndication, widgets) and adapt to the reality that in web 2.0, consumers drive the real estate process. It is more of a change in terminology, then a technology innovation. Successful companies like VFlyer, RES and RealBird understand this and optimize the technology to meet the new requirements of the new real estate process. We are not driving the change, the consumers do, we empower agents to adapt to it.
What I am missing is a good coverage of web analytics for real estate. It has to be demystified. Real estate agents are in the business of conducting real estate transactions and not in being geeks about technology. We have started to write case studies on the RealBird blog in an attempt to QUANTIFY the ROI of new technologies and I would like to see real estate technology bloggers covering it more for the benefits of the real estate industry. There are a lot of articles about the qualitative aspect of applying web 2.0 in real estate but very few about the quantitative aspect of it.
Thanks Joel for the ongoing coverage of the new real estate reality.
– Zoltan Szendro
http://www.RealBird.com
James Thomas | Oct 3, 2007 | Reply
Also check out http://www.classifiedflyerads.com for listing flyer creation and distribution. You are provided with a variety of ways to create your ads and have them syndicated to top directories. Also comes with slideshows, widgets, open tracking stats, link click tracking stats, pdf generation, email your flyers to your contacts and more.
Overland Park Real Estate | Apr 3, 2008 | Reply
I prefer Classifiedflyerads.com myself but RES and VFlyer as great tools as well. I have also tried RealBird and Postlets and they are not too bad either. It is one of those things where if you could take certain aspects of each site and roll it all in to one, you would be set. It seems to me that Classified Flyer Ads has the best SEO but I think VFlyer has the highest PageRank last time I checked.