Free places to market your listings on the Internet
You may already have your listings being fed through IDX to your company web site, or to some of the larger real estate sites such as realtor.com or remax.com. But is it enough? If your seller does a search for their address on google, will it come up? What if a buyer is simply going to google and searching "four bedroom home, *city*"? Your best bet is to get your listing on as many of the big (or search engine loved) sites as you can. Especially if it’s free!
Here are nine places to advertise your property listings on the internet that won’t cost you a dime. This list is by no means complete, but should be considered a starting point.
- Craigslist - It’s not even required for you to sign up for an account (you can confirm your ad via your email). Don’t necessarily limit yourself to your own city. Is it a good investment property? Would it be a good vacation or second home? You may want to choose another city to advertise in. Be sure to read the Craigslist terms of use before you start your ad.
- Trulia - They have a few different ways to submit your listings, all free. Recently Trulia introduced the Trulia Pro account, for $39 per month, which allows you unlimited featured listings and unlimited local spotlight ads. Just submitting your listings is still free, though.
- Active Rain / Localism - at first glance, you’re going to think I’m nuts. Why would you advertise your listings on what is basically a big community of real estate agents? Well, you never know who may be working with a buyer who would love it. But, (and possibly more importantly?) google absolutely loves this site. I once posted a listing and had it indexed in google in under three hours. Sign up for a profile / blog, then use your blog to advertise your listing.
- Windows Live Expo - UPDATE - I went to the site to verify before posting, and got the following message:
(click to enlarge) Disregard this one.
I’m honestly not sure what kind of results this site gets, but I figured since it’s a big name, you might just want to be safe. You can place up to four photos, and choose from one of four backgrounds/themes for your ads. It does require signing up for a Passport or Hotmail account.
- Zillow - Chances are, your listing is already there, but you can sign up as an agent, and claim it. This will enable you to add lots of details about the home that are missing, plus add more photos. You contact info will be seen on the listing, too.
- Google Base - have you ever done a real estate search on google and seen the following little box come up?:
That’s google base. A good many listing feeds are already pushing listings there, so it’s a possibility yours are there. If not, you can add them for free.
- Kijiji - Cute name, but also a pretty big classifieds site. It certainly can’t hurt to try it.
- Backpage - another classifieds site, that I believe pre-dates kijiji. The only problem I see is that they do not have listings for all cities. If your in a smaller city, you may need to advertise in a larger nearby city section. Or, again, think investment/vacation/second home potential, and find a suitable city in a completely different area.
- Hoobly - while not the most attractive site, it is free and does seem to get some love from the search engines, from what I could tell.
- House.info - I tried this one as an experiment, not really expecting much. However, after a few months, I found the listing was getting indexed by google.
There are many more sites out there, but this should be enough to get you started if you haven’t been advertising your listings online much. I restricted the list to sites I’ve actually used before, and sites that are truly free.
If you have trouble with any of them, and would like me to do a step by step tutorial, just let me know in the comments! Also be sure to leave a comment if you’d like to share a free site that works for your listings. (comments are moderated - they will show after approval)
5 Responses to “Free places to market your listings on the Internet”
June 22nd, 2008 at 1:50 pm
[…] Original post by Real Estate Internet Marketing | Technology for REALTORS […]
June 22nd, 2008 at 10:47 pm
Another great place that wasn’t mentioned is a site by PropertyMaps. It’s been a lot of help.
July 10th, 2008 at 5:10 pm
I enjoyed your writing style and I’ve added you to my Reader. Keep these posts coming.
July 26th, 2008 at 4:37 pm
Added. Nice work on this one. Btw, my blog is dofollow, stop by and grab a link. Bompa
August 22nd, 2008 at 5:34 pm
Great posts, you write very well.
We also offer a great place to market rental, rent to own, and owner financing listings at http://www.fillmyproperty.com. We have a family of websites and feed to the most popular sites online.
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