As long-time readers of this blog are aware, I have spent hours sharing my thoughts of a variety of specific real estate advertisements from web sites and newspapers, and demonstrating how much room there is for improvement in most cases.
This, along with continuous questioning of why realty associations continue to publicize negative statistics about home sales instead of only taking a positive slant.
Imagine my anger and frustration when I saw this story from this afternoon about a San Diego realty firm President complaining about how regional and national web sites which use information his office, and other realty offices, provide in order to enhance their (site's) home search capabilities.
http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/166773/arg-realty-claims-ip-theft-pulls-real-estate-list.html?edition=42796
The subject actually has the nerve to complain that this practice is partially to blame for the state of the current real estate market.
Immediately upon reading this nonsense, I offered up the following response on MediaPost, which originated this article:
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There are two sides to this story, which seems to only have covered one side. The story fails to point out how often (or seldom) some of the "other" sites update their listings and information. For example, my understanding is that Yahoo updates every week.
In addition, I have seen numerous instances where the content of a listing ad on a "national" site has differences compared to what is posted on a realty office web page or site. This story does not reflect that point of view. Furthermore, I can't believe that Mr. Abbott (who I do not know and to the best of my knowledge has not previously been a client) has the nerve to be publicly quoted that these other sites have "slowed the recovery of the housing market". He can't really think that if a potential buyer who has to enter specific criteria to search for homes in locations where his office has listings will give up if the one listing they look at is no longer available.
Having personally created more than 12,000 individual property ads during my 23 years of real estate related marketing and advertising duties, I can easily show him examples of how many realty firms do not even inspect ads they have directly placed within a variety of media and distribution sources.
All this while the very realty associations his office and its agents belong to continue to publish negative statistics about the current local housing markets. He should be asking his association people how reporting that (for example) "Local home sales were down 4.8% last month compared with a year ago" is a help to local sales. But, sure, Mr. Abbott can go ahead and blame other web sites which, so far, have been promoting information his people have created without his office or agents having to pay for it.
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I have yet to check Mr. Abbott's office web site to review the listing advertisements on there, but it probably will be a fun task at some point in the near future. Considering the thousands of realty agents that love the fact that Yahoo, Trulia, and other large real estate related web sites bring themselves and their listings "free" additional publicity, there must be a reason why Abbott's advertisements are not producing any results for him and his people.
After all, he and I seem to agree that it takes better advertising and marketing of properties to improve the real estate market.
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