RealBird Blog

New syndication partner site Casalova now shows your RealBird rental listings

We are happy to introduce the latest addition to our syndication partner sites.

Casalova is a Canadian rental portal. It provides an end-to-end rental platform that streamlines the rental process and it is available for both the Canadian and USA market . With our recent integration, whenever you add or an update a rental listing on RealBird, they are now automatically syndicated to Casalova as well. 

Enjoy and keep publishing with RealBird !

-- The RealBird team

New listing syndication partner: Apartable.com

Apartable.com is a recently launched rental search engine and one of our new syndication partners. 

Members of RealBird are now posting an increasing number of rental listings and the new automatic distribution to Apartable will extend the reach of these rental properties beyond the existing portals like Vast, Oodle, Trulia, Zillow and Craigslist. 

Apartable's initial launch covers two metro areas: Boston and Chicago. However, we already syndicate all rental listings on RealBird to them, so when Apartable.com extends its coverage, your listings will be automatically picked up from our automated feed.

RealBird members can publish their rental properties via the RealBird Listing Publisher as usual and we'll take care of the rest.

You can say hello to Apartable.com on the Apartable Facebook Page and via Twitter @apartable 

Thanks and have a great weekend !

-- The RealBird Team
www.realbird.com 

 

Facebook real estate marketing with RealBird

We have more and more options for Facebook real estate marketing with RealBird so we thought a summary post is due, one that explains them all in one post with links to details tutorials. So here we go:

There are two main categories:

1. Marketing individual listings
2. Marketing your inventory

Marketing individual listings on Facebook

1) Create a Facebook Listing Page with the Facebook Like button

This is a brand new and very powerful option. With only a few clicks, you can setup a standalone Facebook Page dedicated to your individual listing. You can then post status updates on your Facebook Listing Page. E.g. price changes, new photos, sales events etc. All these updates are automatically syndicated to your Fans News Feed. See below Mike Conner's RealBird listing website (house is already sold :) that uses the Facebook Like button. He even announced via this channel when the property was sold and I - as a fan of this Facebook Listing Page - learned about it via my own Facebook News Feed. Make sure you invite your sellers to "Like" their own Facebook Listing Page.

Related tutorial: http://realbird.wiki.zoho.com/Create-Listing-Pages-on-Facebook-for-your-properties.html

2) Share your RealBird single property website as link on your Facebook Page

We optimized your RealBird property website in a way that when you copy the link into the status update field of your Facebook Page, Facebook picks up your primary photo automatically. Shared links with photos are more likely to be clicked on than the ones without. Just copy and paste your property website link from the browser's address bar into the status update box of your Facebook Fan Page.

The example shows a typical such post. We shared the first Puerto Rico listing on RealBird via our own RealBird Facebook Page. In you case, it will be your own listing with your own Facebook name and picture of course.

You can also use  our Ping.fm and Posterous integration to automate this process, but even without that, it only takes a few seconds per listing to achieve this.

Marketing your property inventory on Facebook

1) Facebook Page Homes for Sale tab

Use this option to add your RealBird photowall widget of your listing inventory to your Facebook Fan Pageunder its own tab. This requires a one-time setup which takes only a few minutes and then the widget will be automatically updated on Facebook every time you post a new listing on RealBird. Click the image below to see it in action - courtesy of Mike Conner

Related tutorial: How to add your Homes for Sale tab to your Facebook Fan Page

2) Facebook Profile Homes for Sale tab

Similar to the previous option, you can add the photowall widget to your Facebook Profile page as well. Example courtesy of Eric Slifkin

Related tutorial: How to add your Homes for Sale tab to your Facebook Profile

Bonus feature: Add your Facebook Page to your RealBird single property website

This option is a marketing channel with the opposite direction. Use your syndicated single property website to capture new fans for your Facebook Page. Simply add the Facebook Like Box to your RealBird listing website. Listing courtesy of Cheryl Ritchie

See the related tutorial: Adding your Facebook Page to your property website

In short, all you have to do is to post your listing on RealBird once and either via a quick one-time setup or only a few clicks per listing, you can market your listings to Facebook. It was designed to be as quick and easy as possible. We hope you find this post helpful in understanding the many options and benefits you have with RealBird for your Facebook real estate marketing.

We will have a free Webinar workshop on July 13 and we'll walk you through the steps of each options. You can register to the webinar at 9 AM (Pacific time) here or also to the webinar at 2 PM (Pacific time) here

-- Zoltan 
RealBird.com

Updated referral statistics

The updated pie chart below shows the relative click-thru traffic from major real estate portals; i.e. consumer destination sites where RealBird listings are syndicated to (automatically or manually). It is based on the web analytics data of the last 200,000 click-throughs to RealBird single property websites:

Some notes and assumptions:

• Craigslist is a manual distribution option for which we provide all the instructions and code. However, - due to the fact that it requires agents to manually post their listings after entering them in RealBird - the number of RealBird listings published on Craigslist is much less than the number of listings automatically syndicated to portals (Trulia, Zillow etc.). The traffic ratio of Craigslist would be way higher if all RealBird listings were published there as well by our members.


• Trulia and Zillow consumer traffic is comparable (see Compete.com) but the click-through traffic from Trulia is almost three times as much. I suspect, that this is due to the fact, that Trulia has a big, prominent button "See more photos and details" linking to the RealBird property sites, while Zillow has a smaller, regular link on their property pages. In other words, Trulia's property page is more click-through friendly, hence more consumers actually end-up on the RealBird listing websites.


• Since our number of syndicated listings is relatively small compared to the whole for-sale, active, US listing dataset, this chart does not implies in any ways the importance of those sites in terms of consumer traffic or the level of exposure your listing will receive. Statistically speaking, this chart can not be used as a base for making projections on traffic of the included portals. Our dataset is not a representation of such information. It only shows the distribution of traffic sources to the RealBird dataset. Use Compete.com or Quantcast.com for more accurate info on this.

  Update: Based on the conversation with Sara from Zillow (see comments below), I'd like to emphasize it again, that the chart shows the ratio of referral traffic only, which does not have direct relationship with other metrics, like lead conversion etc. For example: one may receive more leads directly on the sites we syndicate to, without the user ever clicking-thru to the RealBird listing website (hence no referral traffic is tracked).



• It is interesting to see that the click-throu traffic from Overstock.com is higher than the traffic from Vast.com, even though OverStock.com's real estate classifieds are powered by Vast.com. It is probably due to the fact, that Overstock has way higher traffic than Vast.com (See Compete.com for details)


• We decided to include ActiveRain traffic that is not click-through referral, but impressions of RealBird widgets embedded on ActiveRain. It may artificially improved the relative rank though. We did so, because we wanted to emphasize the importance of posting listing widgets on ActiveRain, and because we could not find an easy way to separate the two types of web analytics data

Other notable sources of traffic are: Geebo.com,Walmart Classifieds and recently, StumbleUpon

Thank you for Juliet Johnson for making us create an updated chart :)

-- Zoltan
RealBird.com

RealBird Virtual Tour released - with Google Street View, Google Earth and more

We released the RealBird Virtual Tour product during the weekend: a low cost add-on to the free RealBird single property website. It is an MLS-friendly virtual tour service,  which utilizes most of the technologies we developed over the last year for the free single property websites.

This new product closes a very important loop in our listing marketing platform: The free RealBird Listing Publisher provides many ways to reach home buyers with minimum effort through 1) organic search engine marketing 2) automatic syndication to classified ads portals 3) unique and growing set of listing widgets for publishing on blogs and social network like ActiveRain 4) and additional tools to make it easy and fast to manually post on classified sites - like Craigslist - that do not allow automatic syndication.

With the new, low cost RealBird Virtual Tour add-on, you can now utilize the MLS too, as a distribution platform for your online listing presentations. IDX searches are ubiquitous home buyer tools on real estate websites nowadays. In order for your listing to be highlighted on IDX searches with the virtual tour icon and link, you have to include an unbranded virtual tour though. The RealBird Virtual Tour provides both unbranded and branded version so that you can fully comply with your MLS regulations. It is an optional add-on and costs only $9.99 per listing or $14.99 when purchased with a property domain name. As far as I know, the RealBird Virtual Tour is one of the most cost effective virtual tour on the market to reach home buyers through widely deployed IDX searches.

Unique features include:

• Large Google Street View where available - your virtual tour is now also a neighborhood tour
• Complete web analytics - get detailed traffic analysis for your virtual tours using Clicky, Google Analytics and MyBloglog. You will be able to see which local competition brings the most traffic to your virtual tour
• Unlimited variations of design themes with background images and color themes
• 7 different maps and live traffic report

See some of the examples below. You can preview your virtual tour, by creating a free RealBird account (or log in if you are already a member), publishing your listing with the Listing Publisher and preview your virtual tour using the links provided. Both branded and unbranded. Make sure you upload high quality photos for best results.

The virtual tour is an optional, low cost add-on to the free service, and we are really excited about the capabilities. So go, check it out and let us know what you think and what you would like us to add to make it even better.

Here are a few examples:

Janie Coffey's listing is one of the most unique designs and properties in RealBird.

See the unbranded Virtual Tour
Branded Virtual Tour

Listing by Brenda Magness, Brenda Blaser & Pam Yoakum Realty Group. Note the Street View and the Market Statistics tab.

Unbranded Virtual Tour
Branded Virtual Tour

Listing by Bill Gassett.  The screenshot shows the embedded 3D Google Earth.

Unbranded Virtual Tour
Branded Virtual Tour

Let us know what you think.

-- Zoltan Szendro
RealBird.com