Realtor.com, RE/MAX.com, Century 21, and The Others

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While this article was written about Realtor.com it also pertains to the Websites of the major franchises.  We would be interested in hearing from anyone who sees this differently.

7/30 Realtor.com responds>>>>>[A response from Realtor.com]

Since June 1998, more than 12,000 people have read this article.  We have had many E-Mails confirming our conclusions along with a limited few that indicate positive results with realtor.com.   Your comments would be appreciated and significant stories will be shared with our readers.

Last week we had a Realtor contact us and ask how their home page on Realtor.com could be better promoted.  Now, we are quiet familiar with Realtor.com but we had never considered the idea of promoting a Realtors' page that was hosted there.  So, we investigated.  We ran several programs that search the search engines.  Our purpose being to find Realtor home pages that were hosted on Realtor.com.  We didn't find any.  At least none that were indexed under the Realtor.com address. This really got us to thinking.

What we found was that when a searcher uses the keyword "Realtor" connected to a major city he may find, on the lower pages, a listing for Realtors at Realtor.com.  When the searcher clicks on this listing he gets a page on Realtor.com that is a search page for Realtors in the city that was in his original search words.  Ok, now what?  With further clicking the searcher ends up with an alphabetical listing of all the Realtors in the city that he has indicated.   Wonderful, but how does the searcher pick a Realtor?  All there is is a list of names and links.  You got it.  Darts, just throw one and see what name it lands on.

In our research we have also found the sites of the local Realtor associations listed.  While we could not research all the associations across the country, what we found was a situation where Realtors had home pages on these sites but were listed many pages down on the search engines after the pages of the Realtor Association.  This condition may vary across the country as it is something that can be controlled by the local association.

After some further research we came to several conclusions. Realtor.com cannot allow any Realtor to gain unfair advantage over another.  A Realtor cannot promote himself on Realtor.com.  They have even programmed the Realtor listing to rotate so that no one stays at the top of the list.   It also appears that they prevent the search engines from "indexing" the list of Realtors.  So, there is no way to "promote" your home page on Realtor.com.  Let me make this clear.  Your home page on Realtor.com will likely never appear on the search engines.  We're not sure if one was to actually submit a Realtors home page to the search engines if it would show up.  We know that some of the engines will not accept submissions for homepages on the major domains like AOL.   They require that they be submitted via e-mail and then don't promise that they will index them.

So, while there may be some advantage to being listed amongst the thousands of Realtors on Realtor.com, one cannot stand apart from the crowd and promote oneself.  If anyone knows differently, we would appreciate an e-mail.  We might even retract this article.

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REALTOR.COM RESPONDS 7/30

Last week I had a response to this article from Real Select, the company that manages the realtor.com site.  They acknowledged that what I said in this article is basically true.  The representative of Real Select explained that they do not promote individual Realtors.  They recommend that Realtors promote themselves via a web site or homepage elsewhere on the net.  This representative confirmed that this is the company position.

I also received what appeared to be a standard response letter that quoted some fantastic counts of millions of visitors.   The figures quoted far exceed the number of people estimated to be up on the net.   There is no qualifier as to how the figures are complied but I found it to be very misleading.

In talking with a Realtor recently I was told that she paid $350. for her home page on Realtor.com and I found this to be extremely high considering the annual association membership cost.

What do you think? [E-Mail Me]

If you are a Realtor interested in developing serious activity on the net, consider our Internet Marketing packages that include guaranteed visitor traffic. Standard plans are priced at $599 and $899.  These plans produce visitor traffic of up to 600 visitors a month.  We also offer custom plans for brokers that produce traffic of 1,000 to more than 3,000 visitors monthly depending on the clients' goals.

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