Most brokerage websites feature search tools. More and more are integrating neighborhood and listing videos.
Not many have a blog run as a news site with freelance writers paid to produce original content and a suite of stories and videos that feature other brokers’ listings.
“We were looking for ways to keep the consumer interested,” said Yuval Degani, president of Dream Town Realty, a Chicago-based brokerage with three offices and 190 agents that launched a magazine-like blog in January.
“We win when consumers come to our site,” Degani said.
Dream Town-produced video of another broker’s listing featured on the Dream Town blog.
The blog, which Degani says he runs as a source of “independent” Chicago real estate news, features a mix of real estate-related content, including profiles of interesting listings that hit the Chicago market — like the noteworthy glass-walled home that a Ferrari crashed through in the 1986 film “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.”
Other posts feature do-it-yourself tips, financial advice, neighborhood profiles and general consumer-focused Chicago real estate news from real estate writers like author and former Inman News columnist Steve Bergsman and former Chicago Tribune real estate editor Suzanne Cosgrove.
The blog also features Dream Town-produced videos of listings that Degani, as editor of the blog, and his business partner, Avi Ron, president of Dream Town’s commercial division, choose to profile, regardless of whether they’re from other firms or not.
Most days, after perusing Midwest Real Estate Data LLC, the multiple listing service that covers the Chicago area, Ron, who’s been in Chicago’s real estate scene for 25 years, posts a profile of a listing that jumps out at him as a good deal to the blog.
Though the site’s traffic is still not where he wants it, Degani says it’s growing and when the site meets its goal of one new post a day he thinks traffic will jump.
