It's been announced that we can expect the .realtor TLD (top level domain) to be available within a few months.
This presents a golden opportunity for you to grab your own domain (joesmith.realtor) or a domain aimed at your niche market (waterfront.realtor) before the crowd grabs all the good ones!
But once you have your domain, what then?
Well, you create a website, obviously!
By now you probably know that using Intellectual Property and Joomla! you can create a sophisticated, functional, search engine friendly and extremely professional website without programming!
But once you've got your site built and looking great, how do you get data into it? Can you really expect to do manual data entry for thousands of listings in your local MLS?
Of course not!
The first thing to do is to contact your MLS-- your local representatives will be able to tell you about your options for IDX (Internet Data eXchange), the service that lets you put MLS data in your website. The most common option these days is RETS.
RETS is a webservice protocol that standardizes the connection and querying of MLS data, so you can pull the freshest data. However, you still need to format that data and insert it into your website.
The Thinkery can perform this as a service offering for you-- we create an automated routine that pulls the latest data from the MLS association and pushes it into your IProperty website, so it's always up to date and always accurate. And best of all, you don't have to do a thing! It's automagic!
We also can work with you to create a custom export routine to send your own listing data to external marketing services like Quantum Digital, XPress Docs, Rightmove, and of course, Zillow / Trulia.
Using automated imports / exports of data to and from external services, you can massively increase the utility of your site, push data to other services to more widely syndicate your listings, and provide your marketing partners the data they need to create custom postcards, fliers and tours with no intervention on your part. You get to stay focused on your core business-- selling real estate!