A real estate technology company has launched a service that automatically feeds property listings from real estate brokers to national online search and classified advertising sites such as Edgeio, Google Base, LiveDeal, Oodle, Propsmart and Trulia. The slogan: “We manage the feeds, you get the leads.”
SubmitYourListings.com, a sister company to eRealtySolution.com, offers subscription packages from $29.99 per month to $99.99 per month based on the number of listings that it handles for clients. With permission from brokers, the service pulls property listings directly from a multiple listing service and automatically formats and transmits this data to the national sites.
Alex Montalenti, co-founder and director of marketing for eRealtySolution and SubmitYourListings, said the existing eRealtySolution clients, who include about 300 brokers in the New York area, are participating in a trial of the service. Dan Radu is also a co-founder of both enterprises and serves as chief technology officer.
“We realized that over time with growing portals, the broker’s best interest is to get out on these portals with their listings,” Montalenti said.
Several online vertical-search engines for the real estate industry launched over the past year, and SubmitYourListings represents an emerging support structure for this growing niche. Inman News has also reported on another tech endeavor, Postlets.com, that allows consumers and real estate professionals to post property information to several Web sites simultaneously at no charge.
SubmitYourListings founders are working on a separate consumer portal to enter property listings information, Montalenti said, though, “We don’t want to intermingle the two. Brokers are saying they don’t want to intermingle the two at this point.”
Brokers typically don’t have the time or resources to submit property listings data to the many online sites, as these sites typically have different data submission requirements, he said.
“We need to make this as simple as possible for the brokers. Unless they’re a really large company they don’t typically have an in-house technology team to handle these kinds of things,” Montalenti said. “To keep up with these feeds is a lot of work. We built the technology to automate the process.”
ERealtySolution typically posts New York-area clients’ properties at its own real estate search site, LIRealtyGuide.com, and the property listings that are submitted to national sites typically direct consumers back to brokers’ Web sites.
Montalenti said the company is developing a listing management system that will help brokers track the source of online leads. That system should be launched within a month or two, he added.
The new service appears to be generating more traffic for brokers’ listings and Web sites, he said. While the service is now focused on New York brokers, Montalenti said it is designed to be national in scope.
In addition to national portals that feature real estate listings, SubmitYourListings is also pursuing partnerships with local home-search portals.
Google Base, a classified listing service by Google that is now in beta-testing, will likely draw more consumers as real estate content ramps up at the site, Montalenti said. “We believe Web users will soon utilize Google Base more than paid search listings for property, which will most likely include their mapping technology,” according to a company overview.
