The following post is reblogged from our ActiveRain blog
As many of you may know, the RealBird Listing Publisher service is one of the leading single property websites and listing syndication services. It is a completely free service with an extensive set of features that make it easy for you to market your listings online: through search engines, on classifed sites and social networks. Many of you may also wonder how we actually make money to support the free service. In short, we are selling optional add-on services such as street address domain names, map-based IDX search and MLS-friendly virtual tours for those of our members who opt-in to dig deeper into our product offerings. It's a classic model of providing a powerful free service and low-cost add-ons as the revenue source.
One of these optional add-on services is the RealBird Virtual Tour. It is a $9.99 per listing (or $89/year unlimited) low-cost service which provides you with an MLS-friendly unbranded and branded virtual tour service. Some of the unique features include the embedded RealBird mapping technology, including the large Google Street View and Microsoft Bird's Eye View for neighborhood visualization, embedded real-time market statistics and unlimited, high resolution photos.
So what is the MLS-friendly, unbranded RealBird Virtual Tour good for? When you enter your listing into your MLS (and you or your listing broker is opted in for IDX distribution) your listing information is syndicated to 3rd party, licensed real estate websites' search engines through the IDX feed (RETS, FTP etc.). This is a massive distribution as you all very well know, because most of your local agents and brokerage sites provide some sort of IDX or VOW based search engine to their visitors and clients. Fact is that listings with photos and virtual tours get the most attention among competing listings (i.e listings matching a home buyer's interest) One of the common rules of IDX agreements across all MLS markets is that while the 3rd party, licensed real estate website has to indentify the listing broker of the listing, no contact info of the listing broker has to be provided to support them in serving a potential transaction on the buyer side. In accordance with this, virtual tours distributed through IDX feeds with your listings can not include any contact information of you or your listing broker. Hence the need for the so-called MLS-friendly, unbranded virtual tour so that you can safely include it with your listing in the MLS for massive distribution, and to increase your listing's competitiveness.
To demonstrate the capabilities of the RealBird Virtual Tour we start a special promotion of a free giveway on ActiveRain again. (we love the AR platform for such)
So here we go: Any listing which is newly added or an existing one which is updated in RealBird between Monday, Feb 23, 2009 and Tuesday, March 10, 2009 will be automatically upgraded for free to the RealBird Virtual Tour edition ($9.99 value per listing) This is not a trial ! It's a full upgrade for those listings whose "touch date" falls into this 2 week time window. You can add or update as many listings as you wish (please make sure that you have the right to promote that listing)
For existing listings, simply log into RealBird, click "Edit" on the List of listings page and save the listing again with the identical data in order to update the "touch date". We scheduled an automatic process to upgrade the listings within 20 minutes, so in some cases you may have to wait a few minutes and refresh the list of listings page to see the virtual tour links.
So head over to RealBird and get as much free Virtual Tours add-ons during the next two weeks as you wish. If you are new to RealBird, just register for free and add your listings. It only takes a few minutes.
We have one small request though: Please help us share this promotion: Kindly Reblog this post on ActiveRain, share it on Facebook, on Twitter or simply email it to your collegues. Thank you!
-- Zoltan
RealBird.com
For free, high-impact, online listing marketing, visit RealBird.com
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