Real estate agents who use classified listing and syndication service vFlyer now have a more streamlined way of displaying their listings on Facebook, vFlyer announced today.
The company has launched a Facebook application for thousands of agents who are business subscribers of the service. The app adds a "Listings" tab to agents’ Facebook fan pages. The app pulls active listings from a user’s vFlyer account to highlight on his/her fan page, and consumers can click on the tab to view the properties.
Listings link to landing pages on single-property Web sites that vFlyer hosts on its service.
Business subscriptions start at $12.95 per month and the application comes at no additional cost.
"Businesses have been asking us for a simple way to promote their active listings on Facebook," said Aaron Sperling, the company’s CEO and president. "This solution is a simple and effective way to create more exposure of … listings."
Previously, vFlyer clients could install one of the company’s Flash-based widgets (embeddable tools) on the social networking site to show listings.
"We feel having a native Facebook application is going to have a better look and feel than a Flash-based widget (on the site)," Sperling said.
The company’s clients will still be able to use vFlyer’s library of widgets on their personal listing sites.
To set up the application, users install the vFlyer app, plug in their vFlyer e-mail address, pick their vFlyer account from a drop-down menu, and then choose whether to show their vFlyer profile. Because some of this information may be redundant to what agents already have on their Facebook pages, the app gives them a choice, Sperling said.
For more information, the company also provides instructions to set up the app.
If users wish to show only some of their listings, they can set up multiple accounts or sub-accounts to separate rental and for-sale listings, for example.
"This works well when you have a team of agents and they want to segregate their listings as well," Sperling said.
The app on a given page only pulls from one account at a time, however, so users can’t filter listings on the page. The feature is something the company hopes to incorporate later, Sperling said.
For those who want to show all of their listings, but have them currently separated into different accounts, they can clone those listings into one account.
"We’re working on letting people pick ‘all listings’ (instead of having to clone them)," Sperling said.
According to Sperling, most of vFlyer’s customers are agents or agent teams, although some brokerage companies do use the company’s syndication service. The company syndicates clients’ listings to sites like Zillow, Trulia, Cyberhomes, Oodle, Kijiji, Google Base, Yahoo, and FrontDoor, among others.
Sperling said the company has tens of thousands of overall members and several thousand business subscribers. "We often do things to support early adopters and over time more and more will start using those capabilities," he said.
The San Francisco-based company won an Inman News Innovator Award for Most Innovative Web Service in 2007.
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