My Favorite Real Estate Listing Posting Sites

Well, I've been meaning to write more about great sites to post listings on, and rate them, but in order to do it you have to do some homework and it takes a little time to post on a bunch of different sites. Well, my folks recently received a really nice luxury lake home and I really wanted to help them promote it, so I was out hoofing it in cyberspace as it were, trying to help them promote this particular listing. In the process, I revisited quite a few real estate posting sites, and I thought that I'd better do my critique now while they were fresh in my mind. I've tried to list them as much as possible in order from most favorite to least favorite, and list what I like about them and/or didn't like. All of the basic services on the sites below is free.

craigslist.org - Well, for a while craigslist was on my back burner list as I'd had some problems with them, but I tried them out again the other day and the listing I put in was fairly easy to do an worked quite well. Great features of craigslist include:
- They get lots of traffic
- They don't require a userid or password, just your email address
- Their listings are all exposed to the search engines
- They allow for some html in your description, including links to your listing on your own
site, and you can use natural linking , which mean you can hyperlink keywords, which
is important.
- craigslist also has an rss output feed, further increasing the potential for the distribution of your listing, but it only provides titles, no detail. craigslist isn't specific to Real Estate.

backpage.com - backpage is fairly similar to craigslist in most ways except that they probably don't have quite as much traffic as craigslist. Also they don't have quite as many Michigan cities as craigslist, and really only list major metropolitan areas. One thing that is better about backpage though is that they send email renewals allowing you to renew your listings, where they expire on craigslist and you'd have to repost. Also their rss output feed appears to have a bit more content than craigslist. backpage isn't specific to real estate.

trulia.com - I haven't really tied to post to trulia manually, but fortunately they specify an xml format that they will accept, so if you can write a routine to output the data in the proper xml format, you can load your listings to trulia automatically. Whats even better is that, once they have the address of the xml page on your website, they will hit the page regularly and automatically update you listtings on their site based on whats on your site. My hats off to trulia for this setup. With more of this going on on the Internet, traditional MLS systems beware. Trulia also has a strong mapping system. Trulia is a Real Estate only site, and also has an rss output feed.

edgeio.com - edgeio, like trulia also allows you to provide a web address of an edgeio custom xml version of your listing content, and also automatically refreshes it. I had some trouble getting this working recently, and couldn't find the support link on their site, but when I posted her on my blog they read it the next day (gee, someone reads my blog) and helped me right away the next day. edgeio isn't specific to Real Estate.

base.google.com - google base is another site that allows you to load all your listings via a custom xml feed. Unlike trulia and edgeio however, google will expire your listings every 31 days and forces you to manually reload them. If you have the software written to produce the xml file then its only 10 minutes work a month to reload your listings to google base. If you forget to do it they'll still expire and dissappear though. I wish they set thiers up like trulia and edgeio and refresh it from my website directly. One cool thing about google base is that it will give you stats on how often your listings arte being displayed and viewed. trulia and edgeio may have that feature and I just haven't noticed yet.

expo.live.com - I tried expo a couple times recently and had pretty good luck with it in terms of ease of posting. expo live is microsofts answer to the classified website market. They don't appear to allow for any bulk xml uploading just yet, but I did insert a listing manually and it was quite easy. They allow listings to be marked as "cool"similar to Digg, have some interface to facebook, and they show recent posts on the main page. They also show you recent listings you've view after you log on. I don't think they allowed me to put in any link to the actual listing though. I'll have to check out expo live further before I can say too much more about it, but its worth a look.

re-list4free.com - This was another site that I had good success at putting in a listing manually. It did allow me to put in a natural link back to the original listing, but didn't seem to have search engine exposure, meaning I had to submit a form to see my listings. I couldn't get to them just by clicking.

A few sites that I didn't have good luck with were propsmart.com, cytadia.us, and abetterway.com. propsmart seems to hold alot of promise, and has a strong mapping system, and I've posted there before, but I couldn't get a listing submitted because I was having problems with the zip code, and the latitude and longtitude. It was required, and I lost patience trying to figure it out. cytadia and abetterway just seemed to have to many data fields for me.

Stay tuned next time when I review oodle.com, geebo.com, and more.