The Real Estate Broker is Becoming the Travel Agent
Google Maps shows local rentals, homes for sale, and foreclosures. The real estate data is one of their featured content categories, searchable by location, and sortable by price. How long until Google starts charging for featured real estate listings or pushes this offer more aggressively to the end homeowner?
Google is aggressively encouraging syndication to become the default maps play, which will yield more leverage and a more efficient marketplace.
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Aaron, we do better with our maps AND videos combined- but we do list on google base, to be included in the real estate search. Funny, the real estate search box does not show up for our top keyphrase - '[yourcity] [yourstate] real estate'.- at least in our market.
I like the yahoo maps better, they are better suited to our site.
I think this also shows the amazing opportunity for us SEO types to really target the real estate agents / brokers. They are super-sensitive to keyword phrases that "localize" their websites. For example: "san diego real estate broker" as oppossed to "real estate broker". However, getting real estate agents to come off cash can be a very difficult task. With the proper presentation, even agents will see the need to get their websites optimized and pushed toward top rankings in their local markets.
I was recently at Inman Connect and Yahoo was there also starting to push for the XML syndication to be included in their real estate classifieds sections for free. There is a big push for change on the real estate front and it is just getting started. The GYM SE's will look to take the billions in advertising rev. the newspapers have traditionally earned and maybe even interject themselves as lead-gen models using the bait and switch of the real estate listings exposure to gain traction back to their sites and resale those same leads back to the agents who provided the data.
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