Well the decision finally came down the pipe.  Here is the new language according to the Realtor.org website:

Multiple Listing Policy

“Amended the Multiple Listing and Internet Data Exchange Policy to conform to NAR virtual office Web site (VOW) policy and to make clear that participants may not use IDX-provided listings for purposes other than display on their Web sites but are not required to prevent indexing of their Web sites by recognized search engines.”

This is great news for Property Indexer clients and for the entire real estate industry.  It means that agents will now be able to market listings effectively through the search engines.  In the coming weeks and months, I suspect we will see alot of new companies popping up, and many new services that utilize technology to take data from the IDX and publish it.

To read more about the reaction from other Realtors about this decision, check out the Agent Genius website where the conversation continues…

I’m honored to be able to host this 152nd edition of the Carnival of Real Estate.  I first hosted in 2007, then again in 2008.  I can’t believe this is my 3rd time hosting already!!  Time flys.  It’s amazing how much the real estate blogosphere has changed during that time.

You’ll notice that I’m hosting on a different blog this year.  I still have Searching Solutions, but wanted to take this opportunity to introduce this new blog to everyone as it was literally just started early last week.

===

In keeping with a silly tradition I have, I went searching for a crazy photo to theme the carnival after… and found one.  This year, a theme relating to determination, hard work, boldness, hope, and a touch of reckless abandon seemed appropriate.

We’ve all seen our share of difficulty over the last couple of years.  Some have obviously had it harder than others, but for me the whole thing can be summed up in one word:  “change”.

If I could make a brief observation about the state of the real estate blogosphere…

A couple of weeks ago I was browsing some older posts and came across an old 2007 article that listed the top 101 real estate blogs.  As I went down the list I was utterly shocked to see that about 80-90% of the sites were no longer online or hadn’t written a new post in over a year.  What happened?  Where did these people go?  Did they start new blogs?  Did they leave the business?  Did they decide that blogging didn’t work for them?

These kinds of questions have intrigued me over the last 6 months and I have been thinking alot about the time, money, and incredible effort that people have spent building an online presence with a blog.  Some have failed, and others have triumphed.  But one thing is for certain, the successful blogs didn’t get that way by mistake.  If there is one thing that down-turns in the economy can teach us… it’s that the determined entrepreneurs that have vision, determination, and even a little bit of a crazy streak  will continue to be successful no matter what the rest of the market is doing.

I make these observations during this year’s carnival of Real Estate because I didn’t get a single submission from a local real estate blogger (except for the winner Karen that wrote about social media).  I know you are out there, and maybe your are one of those bloggers that has hung up his/her hat…  but don’t give up.  There is still opportunity out there.  Don’t become one of the thousands of real estate bloggers that went strong for a few months only to let it all go to waste.

So my encouragement to the dis-heartened blogger is this:

1. Don’t give up.
2. Don’t copy what everyone else is doing.
3. Don’t stop writing.
4. Don’t stop innovating.
5. Don’t be lazy.

Ok, I’ll get off my soap box… on to the carnival.

===

Winner! – Marketing Home Listings Using Social Media & Twitter – By: Karen Goodman

This was the most enjoyable read by far, and I know some of you are tired of reading about social media marketing, but Karen made it a really fun read and illustrated why it can be so vital as a marketing tool in an agent’s arsenal if done properly.  Bottom line, there are alot of talkers when it comes to social media, but not many people executing it well.  Karen really seems to get it.  Thanks for the fun read Karen!

2nd Place! – Fannie Mae Toughens Guidelines on 2-Unit Homes, Trailing Spouses, and Retirement Portfolios By: Dan Greene

There were more mortage and lending related postes submitted than any other kind to the carnival this year, but Dan’s blew them all out of the water.  He knows his stuff.  If you are an owner of, or an investor in any 2-unit properties and are thinking about doing a refi, this is a must read as it details some of the new underwriting regulations Fannie Mae is putting out.

===

Runner Ups:

• The Pros and Cons of Non-Bank Lenders on the “Home i Own” Blog

• Panama Property: Doing Better Than Many Markets, But Not Immune to the Global Downturn on RevealRealEstate.com

Thank you everyone for participating in this week’s carnival.  Hope to see you next year!

One of the biggest challenges for new sites is getting them indexed. This issue is compounded for Property Indexer sites as we are publishing literally hundreds of pages of content in a very short amount of time. PhoenixListingsForSale.com for example has almost 900 pages already (in the first week!) and one of the most difficult issues is getting Google to place all of those pages in their index.

From my experience, the number of pages Google will index is normally tied directly to domain authority which is usually a result of the number and quality of inbound links to the domain.  If you don’t know what I’m talking about, let me try to simplify it:

You get links to your website –>  Google trusts your site more –>  More pages of your site get into the Google search results

In a case with a brand new site, it is notoriously difficult to get pages indexed because it has no previous history with the search engines.  There is no established trust.  For a brand new site to get 100% of the pages indexed is nearly impossible depending on the size of the site.

===

So, I wanted to share a couple of screen shots for this particular site that show the relative success we’ve had so far in getting pages indexed.

279 Pages Indexed So Far:

Traffic Reporting For the First Week:

Ranking Example For An Individual Property:

I realize, this is only 1 weeks worth of data, but I believe we are on the right track.  The site is getting the deeper pages indexed, is showing in the search results, and is seeing decent traffic numbers from search.

In the coming weeks, we’ll go deeper into indexing issues and what other factors search engines look at to decide which pages are important enough to index and rank well.

It’s a win/win for everyone:

• the consumer finds the information they are looking for
• the listing agent gets extra exposure for their property
• the agent marketing the listing may obtain a buyer

Disclaimer:  I want to be very clear that I am not an expert in this area.  I’ve only become deeply interested in these issues for the past 9-12 months, and don’t have an intimate knowledge of  many of the technologies.  However, I am a quick learner, and with your help, I hope to become an authority on these issues and help educate the real estate community on the various products, technologies, and controversies surrounding this new industry.

As some of you may know, my early experiences with getting MLS data indexed by the search engines was a smashing success and I’m a huge believer in these types of systems.  Needless to say, we are very excited to start blogging on these issues and get the input and feedback from the real estate community.

Please share this blog with your friends in the real estate industry.

Hope to see you back again soon!

Just wanted to share a recent experience I had creating a RE website. Granted, I don’t have a huge amount of experience building or designing websites, but I was up for the challenge and wanted to get my hands dirty with some of the new technologies available with RSS, IDX, social media, etc…

Luckily the client is a close friend so he was very patient with me…  He’s my dad!  He hired me on a limited basis to redesign his old Advanced Access website that he had for over 10 years.

WordPress was the obvious choice as a platform since it’s so search engine friendly, but is also very flexible in terms of design and features.  I also jumped right on with Diverse Solutions as they have a really slick IDX system that allows the creation of RSS feeds based on a custom property search criteria.

===

The design and set up went smoothly enough…  I used my favorite hosting company:  BlueHost to switch the domain over and got to work installing WordPress.  I chose a real estate specific theme called irealestate, that at the time was one of the first real estate WordPress themes ever created to my knowledge.  It has a really cool blue tabber on the right that can feed recent posts from any category you choose.

Without boring you with the details, we got the site up and running without too much trouble… but there was one thing that was really bothering me.  How do we showcase listings on the website without using a lame, cumbersome, framed in version of the IDX search?  It’s slow, confusing, and just looks crappy framed into the site.  You can see an example of what I mean here.

Not only that… from experience, I know that those iframes are very UN-friendly to search engine crawling and might as well be a blank page in the eyes of the search engines.

So immediately, one of my #1 goals became:  how do I fix this???  How can I get listings to show up as static pages of the website that can be crawled and found by the search engines?

As I was digging around and researching this problem, I stumbled upon a feature of the irealestate theme I had purchased that had a page template that allowed you to feed listings into into it through RSS.  Bingo!!  I thought I had found the perfect solution!.  You can see an example on this OC Foreclosures page.

The only thing that bothered me was that it just lined up all the listings on the page.  I had seen something like this before on Jay Thompson’s website under the Phoenix Listing Feed section.  It is really cool, but I recognized immediately that this wouldn’t solve my search engine problem.  Yeah, the search engine might crawl this page and find some of the listing data, but it was on a single page, and it would constantly change because of the data feed it was pulling from.  Not exactly the great solution I originally thought it was.

===

So I kept looking…  I knew exactly what I wanted, but didn’t know how to make it happen.  My dream was to have a feature that allowed individual listings to automatically create a single blog post as they came into the feed under whatever criteria I chose.  So, if I wanted to have a category of listings in a certain zip code with a certain price range, I could set it up so every time a listing came up, a new blog post was created with WordPress.  This would ensure that each listing got it’s own unique URL on my site and would be able to be crawled and found by the search engines.

Alas, I began to start thinking that this was probably just impossible…

Around the same time I was looking for a solution to this problem, a friend of mine over at the Real Estate Tomato (Jason Benesch) announced the soft launch of a tool he called Listing Press.  It was almost exactly what I was looking for (and I highly recommend it if you want a plugin solution).

But being the DIY’r that I am, I had to find another way to make this happen and make it have the flexibility I wanted it to.  The the search continued…

Low and behold, after searching for many many hours, I found just the thing.  A combination of plugins and tweeks that would do exactly what I wanted.  I turned it on at about 2am one night after working for about 6 hours on it, crossed my fingers, and went to bed….  The goal was to set it up so the listings would populate as blog posts automatically without me having to do anything and I knew that by the time I woke up I would know whether I had accomplished this goal.

I rolled out of bed at about 8am to check the computer, and to my utter amazement, 95 new blog posts had been created over night!!!!!  Each one of them was a new listing pulled down from my Foreclosure feed that I had created with Diverse Solutions.  Amazing!!!

===

Sorry, I know this post is getting long, but I almost feel like I need to journal it because what happened in the weeks to follow was incredible…

Because of some other work obligations and a vacation, I wasn’t able to really work on the site for about 2 weeks.  I did set up some new feeds…  I was really interested in the foreclosures because I knew that the REO market was really hot in Orange County and wanted to capitalize on that.  I created 5 categories on the blog, each one targeting a different price range of foreclosures.  I also found a really cool tool on Diverse Solutions that allowed me to find properties with price reductions… that was pretty cool too so I created a new page for that as well.

After a couple weeks, we had over 1,000 blog posts on the site as listings and noticed that many of them were even ranking when you did a search for the address, or even the street name.  I found that they even outranked sites like Zillow and Trulia for the same listings… and most of the listings were so fresh that most of the sites that publish listings hadn’t even found them yet.

But where was the traffic??!!  I was starting to get frustrated that my dad wasn’t getting any calls or emails.  Why wasn’t it working?

Then I got the call that changed everything…

My dad called me early on a Monday morning saying that he just got a call from very angry Orange County resident saying that he was so tired of his phone ringing off the hook for people wanting more information on real estate listings.  Bingo!

Stupid me!!!!  I had placed the wrong phone number on the IDX feed!  LOL!!!!  There were hundreds of listings being indexed by Google with this poor guys phone number on them.  I immediately deleted all of the posts and started from scratch.  But the good thing was, I knew it was only a matter of weeks before we started seeing some real leads and traffic.

It didn’t even take 3 days…  My dad called me on Thursday telling me he had 4 calls that day for people wanting more information on “listings they had seen on Google” and it looked like at least 2 of them were going to use him to represent them as a buyer’s agent.  Pretty amazing.  We had done it, and the scary thing was that we hadn’t even scratched the surface yet.

===

That was a couple weeks ago.  Since then, the phone is still ringing off the hook, the listings are still getting posted automatically, and the traffic for the site is around 200 visitors per day when it was previously about 25 per day.  Over 90% of the traffic is coming from search engines and I’m just amazed at the potential.

Some possible opportunities and deals have opened up, and I’m weighing my options on what I should do with this technology.

I wanted to get some feedback from you, my readers on what you thought about this whole thing.  Even though I’m a nerd, I’m not as smart as I look.  I feel like I’ve got a tiger by the tail and am not totally sure what to do with it.

You’ll notice that I didn’t get into alot of detail on how I did it, and that is for a few reasons:

First, I’m not completely sure what I should do with this information.  Should I share it with the world, or keep it under my hat?

Second, I don’t want everyone and their mother flooding the Google index with listings.  A wise man once told me that if I have something good going, why try to publish it to the world and risk running into unforeseen problems (that man was actually Jonathan Washburn who gave me personal advice on another business I had in late 2006)

Third, I’ll be honest… I’m selfish.  I’m not sure I want to release it on a broad scale because there might be some business models I can create out of it.

So, I defer to you the my readers.  What do you think I should do with it?  I’m trying to be as transparent as possible here.

Here are a few of my ideas… you let me know if I’m crazy or not…

• Keep it secret and just make my dad a ton of money.
• Release it to a few key brokerages around the country that could benifit from it as a source for leads.
• Create a business that designs basic WordPress sites, or takes existing WP sites and add this functionality.
• Hire a developer to create a WordPress theme that has this functionality built in.
• Create a bunch of sites around the country and use them to farm leads and create a referral network.
• Lastly (and this is my favorite and the one I’m leaning towards)…  create a large video series on how to do it and release it for a small fee.  There are a ton of features and possibilities that I didn’t even go over in this post.  Like how to exclude listings from showing up in your main blog, how to syndicate this feed to Twitter and Facebook, how to create a custom email subscription box for a certain search criteria, how to create a feed based on any search criteria you choose… the possibilities are endless and I think I could create about 5-6 hours of video that would explain how to do everything…

What do you guys think?  Am I crazy?  Shoud I try one of the above ideas or just keep it under my hat???

Thanks for listening to my ramblings this morning….