Adding Craigslist RSS Feeds to your site can be a good promotion

I've been carrying Craigslist RSS feeds on a clients Real Estate website for quite a while, and after sticking with these somewhat secondary pages on the site, I have to say that the effort has born some fruit.

If your not familiar with RSS, its an XML based file format that a sending and receiving party to share data easily. It's tag based, like html, but the main intention of XML and RSS is to transfer the content, with less emphasis on how it should be displayed (there are techniques to specify preferred display now with XML, but we'll leave that for another day).

To display others RSS feeds on your website, you need:
- A dynamic website with some language that can be run on yor webserver. I use PHP.
- An XML parse module (or you could write your own from scratch but it's not necessary)

The way it works is that, when someone hits a page on my site that contains an RSS feed, my website server dynamically goes and hits the RSS feed address of the other site, such as Craigslist, pulls the data back realtime, and parses it for display in html on my page. Keep in mind though that what your retriveing is not html and not ready for immediate display. You have to read the records and output them in html, just as any other dynamic webpage works.

RSS is a boiled down XML specification, and typically includes a list of "News stories" or items. Each item consists of title, description, author, date, and a link to the full article on the originators site (Yes there's something in it for them too).

Here's some stats from my clients site to show you how including craigslist pages have helped with traffic:

Top Entry pages for February 2008(Webalizer)
1 2779 4.58% 1374 27.90% /
2 178 0.29% 127 2.58% /listings/314.html
3 138 0.23% 107 2.17% /craigslistannarbor.html
4 140 0.23% 99 2.01% /craigslistdetroit.html
5 256 0.42% 83 1.69% /listings/lakeproperties.html
6 175 0.29% 76 1.54% /adminsect/rsr-links.html
7 139 0.23% 75 1.52% /listings/311.html
8 165 0.27% 73 1.48% /listings/vacant.html
9 161 0.27% 62 1.26% /lakesomerset.html
10 68 0.11% 57 1.16% /listings/139.html


Top Search Queries(Google Webmaster Tools)
1 27% remerica 9
2 16% michigan real estate listings 8
3 7% craigslist ann arbor mi 8
4 4% craigs list ann arbor mi 3
5 4% vacant land for sale in michigan 9
6 3% somerset michigan 9
7 3% remerica real estate 8
8 3% craigslist ann arbor michigan 9
9 3% craigslist for ann arbor mi 5
10 2% somerset mi 9
11 2% craigslist ann arbor 46


Top Content last 30 days (Google Analytics)
1. / 745 433 00:01:28 38.16% 32.35% $0.29
2. /listings/lakeproperties.html 351 181 00:00:57 35.00% 17.38% $0.17
3. /listings/vacant.html 205 125 00:00:43 52.50% 31.71% $0.08
4. /listings/residential.html 202 118 00:00:53 39.47% 23.27% $0.08
5. /listings/314.html 199 171 00:01:14 77.37% 65.33% $0.00
6. /index.php?framecontent=mls-drilldown-menu.php&county=Hillsdale 184 46 00:00:20 0.00% 1.63% $0.11
7. /southern-michigan-mls-county-index.html 182 87 00:00:20 10.00% 4.95% $0.23
8. /listings/311.html 157 122 00:00:55 66.67% 40.76% $0.00
9. /lakesomerset.html 150 113 00:01:11 41.18% 38.00% $0.13
10. /craigslistannarbor.html 143 120 00:04:36 83.90% 81.82% $0.00
11. /listings/223.html 137 82 00:00:58 20.00% 10.95% $0.00
12. /listings/all.html 130 67 00:01:02 27.27% 16.92% $0.07
13. /listings/326.html 121 80 00:00:32 50.00% 23.97% $0.12
14. /listings/319.html 119 61 00:00:42 39.47% 26.05% $0.08
15. /craigslistdetroit.html 118 98 00:04:21 82.47% 78.81% $0.10


To find the Page Address of RSS Feed for the Craigslist page you's like to add to your site and select your region (I think craigslist makes you select a region first). For me, that takes me to http://jxn.craigslist.org/
Then I select "Real Estate for Sale", and click on the Orange RSS Icon at the bottom right of the screen, as shown.




Don't worry about the format of the resulting page that you get; it may look strange because its rss/xml, not html. The important thing now is to grab the address from your browser bar. That's the address that any software you set up will need to refer to to pull the feed.

So the Craigslist's page for Jackson Michigan Commercial Listings is:
http://jxn.craigslist.org/off/

(Don't confuse that with the RSS feed address. To get that you would need to go to that page, scroll to the bottom, and click on the orange RSS link icon, as previously discussed).

You can see the result of subscribing to the feed by going to my clients site at
http://www.remericasomersetrealty.com/craigslistjackson.html

When Real Estate Boards Make Different Rules For The Same MLS Website

A little while back, I was working on getting MLS Listings into an clients website, when I noticed one of the listings had the Realtors info in the description. I thought it was odd because I had been told that was against the rules. On checking with the Real Estate Board that they were a member of, the person first told me that wasn't allowed and they would have to check. After checking, however, they came back and said that the listing in question came from another adjacent county, and a from a member of another board, and that each Board had their own set of rules on how they could put their listings in. Now most folks that have been involved with Real Estate and the MLS systems know that people put listings in, and then share them on each others websites. Most sites, when displaying these listings, try very hard to downplay the listing brokers info and use the page as an add for themselves. This is the main reason that some Realtors engage in the practice of putting their info - name, phone, company - in the description o try to get some exposure for themselves on their own listing.

The issue that I have with this is that, now I display their listings, and they are allowed to prominently display their info in the description on my page, but when they display my listings on their page, I'm not allowed to put my info in the description, effectively allowing them to more easily hide or downplay me as the listing broker. And this is all on the same website. Am I missing something or does that seem like a bit of an inequitable arrangement? For my client, who sits on the border of 3 counties, its especially tough.

Now to be fair to their local Real Estate Board, I tend to agree with them in that I don't think that the agents' info should go in the description. But in the end all the boards sharing this MLS Website need to negotiate common rules that better disallow hiding the listing brokers information.

Using Google Maps on your Real Estate Site

I've done a bit of work on the Real Estate website that I support for a client, so I thought I'd discuss a few things I learned about using Google maps with listings in your website.

When I first set up the clients site, I set up a little logic to dynamically put a link to a Google map showing the location of the property on a map. So, based on the address fields in the database, I would print out something like:

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=14700 Hilltop Drive, Somerset, MI 49281&spn=0.026496,0.043460&hl=en

Where the address is, obviously, 14700 Hilltop Drive, Somerset, MI 49281.

This gives a map that looks as follows when clicked on:



The problem with this though, is that Google just can't resolve some addresses. It's not really Googles fault, as pinpointing a location on a map based on a street address is prone to all kinds of problems. I'll give just one example of that.

My client lives in a rural area of Michigan. When post offices were first created in the area in the early part of the century, the locations were based on the towns that thrived around the railroad (believe it or not). A couple of these junctions were the towns of Cement City and Jerome. These towns, and Jerome in particular, are quite small. In the last 20 or 30 years, Lake communities have spring up at both Lake Somerset and Lake LeAnn whose populations are much larger. But mailing addresses for many around Lake Somerset are still Cement City to this day. Likewise, many homes around Lake LeAnn still have mailing addresses of Jerome, even though its several miles away.

Ok enough of the example. What's a better method than using mailing addresses to create a map? The best way is to use latitude and longitude and create a slightly different link, that would look as follows:

http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&q=42.05202,-84.385208&ie=UTF8&ll=42.05202,-84.385208&spn=0.06326,0.129089&z=15

The Google page that comes up when you click on the link looks like this:



While the accuracy is good you'll notice that the location on the map is labeled only by the latitude and longitude this time, which isn't as nice. I suspect that there's a way to correct that by adding other parameters to the url but I haven't had time to tinker with it. If your interested, you can find some Google Maps parameter info here.

In addition to the above described techniques, its also quite easy to embed static google maps on a website. Just use Google maps, and when you get the map you'd like to embed on your website, click the "link" link just above the map to the right, as shown below:



Then paste the resulting code into your website in the spot you want to use it. I did find though, that Google won't allow you to use that as a template and dynamically alter the parameters to show different maps. Your given an ID and its good for that one map.

To get really serious about utilizing Google maps in your Real Estate or other map related website, check out the Google Maps API. With this you can do quite a bit more than anything I've described above.