RealBird Blog

Improved listing management, SMS with signature and Backpage syndication update

We released a few improvements over the weekend, before the rollout of some major new features in the upcoming weeks. Below is a quick list of these updates:

Improved Listing Management Page

Ideal for users who manage a large inventory on RealBird, the listing filter form now retains your settings, so upon subsequent visits (e.g. after updating a listing or log in the next day), the last filter will be applied again. As a practical case, you may have dozens or hundreds of sold listings published through RealBird, but you rarely need to edit or manage them once added. So setting and retaining, Active and "Published only" filters will make managing current listings much easier.

Backpage syndication update

The automatic syndication to Backpage now shows your broker/company name and your state license number for compliance with local rules. Make sure that you add these information to your profile in RealBird and we'll take care of the rest.

SMS marketing platform bug fix

A software issue has been identified and fixed over the weekend that affected text code handling for those client's whose text messaging app is configured to include their signature automatically. The RealBird SMS Text Message Marketing platform now correctly handles these specific cases as well. 

Advanced, lead capture webhook API

This is an advanced feature and it is valuable for those members who work with 3rd party developers. If configured, we are now posting the details of your lead as you receive them to any 3rd party webhook Url you set. This is a preliminary release of this feature and available upon request. More details about this including documentation and other API features will be posted in the upcoming weeks.

-- The RealBird Team
www.realbird.com

Kijiji revisited

We wrote about Kijiji (an eBay company) a year ago, a few months after they had made their first push into the US classified ads market. We quickly added an option to RealBird to make it a very easy, copy and paste operation to manually post your RealBird property advertisement to Kijiji. A few days ago I wrote about the main referral sources to the RealBird single property websites and I thought while I am at it, I follow up by revisiting Kijiji, Oodle and Backpage to see how they compare today, in terms of traffic and demographics. I selected these three classified ads portals, because they support similar verticals (not just real estate, like Trulia and Zillow) and because they are comparable in terms of overall traffic. I left out Craigslist from the comparison because it is still a magnitude larger in terms of traffic compared to these other important destination sites.

Update: Based on the reminder by Craig (see comments), it is important to note, that Oodle provides an API for 3rd party implementations and due to their partnerships with large online outlets like MySpace, listings syndicated to Oodle may reach way more actual people, than the Compete.com chart above would suggest. The point of this post is to show the growth of Kijiji over the last year and the importance of marketing real estate listings there as well.

Kijiji's own site claims 5 million uniques (vs the 2.5M+ reported by Compete), which is quite possible as Compete.com shows less unique visitors on RealBird sites than the number reported by our Google Analytics deployment.

Digging deeper into the stats (this time using quantcast.com for sub-domain traffic) one can see which markets (DMAs) are the most popular on these sites.

Kijiji.com

Backpage.com

Oodle.com

These charts are quite easy to read and the value of posting your RealBird listings to these classifieds sites is quite obvious, especially if your listing is in one of the top markets. (E.g. Washington, DC metropolitan area on Kijiji with over half a million people visiting a month or New York on Backpage)

Click the images above to dig deeper into the stats and see the monthly uniques in your DMA (Demographics Market Area) Also note that the demographics of these general purpose classified-ads site is different than Zillow's or Trulia's (focused on real estate only)

This post might be also a good reminder for all of our current RealBird members to take the time to manually post to Craigslist, Kijiji and Backpage (Oodle is an automatic syndication option). It takes only a few extra minutes per listing and you can potentially expose your property ads to hundreds of thousands of new prospects, out of which it only takes one actual buyer to sell the property :) Instructions and copy&paste code is provided in the RealBird member area.

-- Zoltan Szendro
RealBird.com