Let’s say you are a property management company dealing with individual residential units and multi-family community rentals and asset management. Its property managers and leasing agents manage more than 3,000 units and more than 400 are available for rent. Your administrators, agents, and / or managers spend hours each week manually uploading their listings to MLS, Rentals.com, Apartments.com, Zillow.com, Google Base, Truli, Hotpads.com, and dozens more (or worse, they don’t) . do this at all). This is slow and inefficient in your mind, as you would like to see property managers running the business, increasing your inventory, and keeping your owners and tenants happy. This is a common scenario and I’m going to talk a bit about how you can work to reduce the number of touch points when marketing and running ads. This also applies to standard real estate brokers, so real estate agents and brokers, this is for you too!
The first step is to identify where in the configuration of a new listing on your systems (Yardi Voyarger, Propertyware, internal listing management system) you would like to have as your “source” for all listing information, such as property description, marketing title, address, photos and all other associated information. This is important because it will determine if you will need to hire a developer to integrate with those systems. Some of them provide the built-in ability to extract this type of information, while others do not without costly vendor support.
The second step is deciding which real estate websites you think are most effective for your ads. For rental listings, I recommend the following websites to syndicate (auto-submit your listings):
Syndication
Unpaid Distribution Partners (Free):
Yahoo Real Estate
Googlebase
Zillow
Trulia
Oodle
Military.com
Walmart classifieds
BackPage.com
Local.com
Lycos Classified
Rented spaces (AOL)
MySpace ranks
CLRSearch
HotPads
Vast.com
Huge
RentBits
Yakaz
Layar
Aloqa
Trovit
Twitter – Hotpads
Twitter: your home account
Facebook – Oodle
Facebook: your home account
Payment distribution partners:
RentalHomesPlus.com
Rentals.com
In order to automate your rental ads, I recommend using one of the three main technologies (although it is not the only method):
1. HTTP DATA POST
2. XML POST
3. Third party distribution
HTTP data publishing and XML publishing require a developer or consultant to build the system for you. There are some advantages to these first two options that # 3 “third party distribution” can’t do, like letting you have aggregate reporting and tracking for all potential customers. In the case of option n. 3, I recommend using Realbird.com, a site geared towards real estate agents / brokers that allows you to manually upload your listings and distribute them on many of the sites I listed above for $ 89 / year. Because this requires manual loading and management of listings (expired, etc.), it leaves something to be desired in terms of efficiency, but will be the least expensive from a hard cost standpoint. After factoring in your employees’ time to manage inventory, you might be surprised how much it is costing you and your staff.
Using HTTP or XML data posts to pull your listing data from your management software to your company website and then distribute it from there is the ideal method. It allows you to integrate with CRM or lead management software to track all calls, emails, and other points of contact on your own websites and other websites that you don’t own! I’ll have a full blog post on lead management sometime next week, so keep an eye out for that.
Unfortunately, there is no DIY guide to list distribution, but it is absolutely possible with the right consultant leading the project. Plan to spend between $ 10,000 and $ 50,000 depending on the complexity and nature of the project. This should give you an idea of how to budget. The investment pays off in the long run, especially when you factor in integration with lead management.
Please post any questions you may have about your business and I will try to answer in details to help point you in the right direction. Until next time.