Where should an agents home listings be adverstised on the internet? Everywhere! Realtor.com, a broker website and the local MLS are not enough.
Statistics from Hitwise, the web research firm shows that Realtor.com has 5.49% of the visitors and Zillow had 3.63% of the visitors for the week of 7/17/2010.
What is really interesting is that most of each site’s visitors did NOT visit the other site during that same period, this information came from comScore data, another research firm.
What’s the point? For seller’s you want your home to receive the most exposure on as many real estate “portals” as possible. Most portals are reaching different buyers.
For example, Homefinder.com, the home search portal for over 130 different newspapers had about 910,000 unique visitors in May, it allows sellers, through their real estate agent to reach potential buyers who are searching on newspapers’ websites but may not be visiting sites like Realtor.com. SIDEBAR – Our local paper, The Kansas City Star uses Homefinder.com as their real estate search tool. What is really interesting is that some of the largest real estate brokers in town have refused to post their sellers’ homes on the site! They have made a careful decision to limit their clients’ home’s exposure.
According to Zillow, “Due to the limited audience overlap among top national listing sites, agents and brokerages must cast their net as wide as possible on the Web and broadly syndicate listings to the top sites that home shoppers visit most frequently.”
Point2Agent, a listing distribution and syndication company, used by client centered agents and brokers, says “distribution trumps destination.” Like I explain to my clients, “I have over 50 websites because I prefer to fish with a net instead of a fishing pole.”
Bottom line, find an agent that knows what they are doing when it comes to internet marketing and will place your home on as many websites as possible. This is no different than selling toothpaste in 1950. The only difference is that most real estate agents do not really know where there clients homes are being advertised. Nor can you trust that the local big name broker is doing this.
From Bernice Ross, “Syndicating listings to multiple real estate portals in today’s competitive real estate market is an absolute necessity. … the greater your exposure, the more likely you are to sell that listing for the highest possible price in the shortest amount of time.”
Thanks Bernice I could not have said it better! 
