Friday, April 6
New Things For Real Estate Happening on Google Base
If you haven't checked out Google Base lately I am telling you that you should. Google Base has been adding some really neat things in the last several weeks.
First you can now add your entire store database to Google Base and show your products not only in Froogle with one feed, but in Google AdWords. And now Google Base is targeting real estate agents, brokers, IDX suppliers, and MLS search engines.
If you are an agent or broker, you can create or have created for you a Google Base feed that contains a database of sorts of your listings. You can do this manually one by one or create a text file or XML file and upload with one click all your listings.
The only problem that I see right now is that listings only last 14 days at this point, so it means that you really need to update your feed once a week and reload it at least every week and one half to be sure that your listings don't fall out. Hopefully Google will fix that aspect soon.
In the meantime, it may be an opportunity for you to get more exposure for your listings in a very cost effective manner. Personally due to the time to create a feed and to maintain it, if I were an agent or broker I would be pushing my IDX supplier to embrace this technology and do the heavy lifting for me and let them absorb the costs. But for tech savvy agents and brokers, this may be a neat way to stay on top of the game before the IDX and MLS suppliers get with the program.
If you do decide to invest the time and resources to do a feed for Google Base, it would be incredibly smart to market this as a perk to your clients that not only do you now give them MLS exposure, but all listings appear on Google Maps, Google AdWords and in the Google search index when you use Google Base. Using the power of Google you can leverage more real estate exposure for yourself and your clients with Google Base.
First you can now add your entire store database to Google Base and show your products not only in Froogle with one feed, but in Google AdWords. And now Google Base is targeting real estate agents, brokers, IDX suppliers, and MLS search engines.
If you are an agent or broker, you can create or have created for you a Google Base feed that contains a database of sorts of your listings. You can do this manually one by one or create a text file or XML file and upload with one click all your listings.
The only problem that I see right now is that listings only last 14 days at this point, so it means that you really need to update your feed once a week and reload it at least every week and one half to be sure that your listings don't fall out. Hopefully Google will fix that aspect soon.
In the meantime, it may be an opportunity for you to get more exposure for your listings in a very cost effective manner. Personally due to the time to create a feed and to maintain it, if I were an agent or broker I would be pushing my IDX supplier to embrace this technology and do the heavy lifting for me and let them absorb the costs. But for tech savvy agents and brokers, this may be a neat way to stay on top of the game before the IDX and MLS suppliers get with the program.
If you do decide to invest the time and resources to do a feed for Google Base, it would be incredibly smart to market this as a perk to your clients that not only do you now give them MLS exposure, but all listings appear on Google Maps, Google AdWords and in the Google search index when you use Google Base. Using the power of Google you can leverage more real estate exposure for yourself and your clients with Google Base.
Labels: Google Base
¶ 4/06/2007 10:21:00 AM
