RISMEDIA, Feb. 11, 2008-RealBird, a provider of Internet marketing tools for the real estate industry announces the release of its interactive map-based MLS search service with MRIS (Metropolitan Regional Information Systems) MLS (Multiple Listing Service) listing data. With MRIS coverage, the company says that RealBird’s services become available to an additional 60,000 real estate professionals in Maryland, Washington D.C., Northern Virginia, and parts of West Virginia and Pennsylvania.
Part of Realbird’s MRIS service is the recently announced, new version of its RealBird Listing PublisherTM, an innovative, fully Web-based product to help Realtors® market their listings and generate leads from the major real estate online classifieds portals. With this new product, the company says that agents and brokers can increase their lead generation efficacy by embedding their branded IDX Search directly in every published single property website which are syndicated to the major classified portals. Compared to “traditional” single property website marketing tools, which only syndicate the agent’s own listing, the RealBird service increases customer response by a very significant factor.RealBird is one of the only service providers in the real estate industry to provide such an innovative “application syndication” service. The RealBird Publisher service is available to all USA real estate agents free of charge. The Map-based Interactive MLS Search is available with 14 MLSs and costs only $19/month for individual agents (MLS IDX user fees may apply).
The Growing Importance of Effective Property Websites for Lead Generation
The downturn in the real estate market has forced agents to beef up their marketing services to be competitive. With the new RealBird Listing Publisher, the company says that agents can create dedicated property websites for every listing within minutes and for completely free. Other property website solutions cost up to $99/year for a single listing! This made it costly for a listing agent to commit to creating a property website for every listing. Even if the agent has no active listings at the moment, he or she can publish Sold listings just to get exposure for their active MLS Search and create link-backs to his or her website. The RealBird Listing Publisher also enables agents to create draft presentations for listing interviews. Using such advanced online listing marketing techniques, agents can greatly improve their chance of winning listing interviews.
With the RealBird Listing Publisher agents can create stand-alone websites with maps, photos, slideshows, videos, external virtual tours and any other information pertaining to the property and its community. The company says that these single property websites work because they are syndicated to major classifieds portals, the very places where home buyers are searching.
However, until now, the efficacy of converting lookers into leads has still been relatively low because home buyers, while browsing classifieds portals, will most likely quickly click away from any one listing that does not match exactly their expectation.
The feature in the RealBird product is the ability to embed in Single Property Publisher websites the agent’s MLS interactive map search. Exposing the MLS search where most home buyers are searching makes the agent’s branded MLS search accessible through multiple websites, instead of just on their own website. To illustrate, please go to http://www.58NorthGate.com or http://www.greathome2sell.com and click on the Map Search tab.
The RealBird Publisher service also helps generate traffic to agents’ websites. A real estate website is only as good as the traffic it gets – and in today’s competitive world it is hard to gain online visibility and differentiation without a huge marketing expense, and the new RealBird Publisher offers an elegant and effective solution, at a very low cost.
For more information, visit http://www.RealBird.com.