Real Estate Blog

As you travel through life you bump into all sorts of people. The internet is great because it exposes you to a far greater range of people, it’s a shame that you’ll never probably get to meet them. It broadens perspectives and challenges your preconceptions.

So moving on. There’s a chap called Mike aka SiteTutor who puts himself about a bit and he’s set up a real estate blog. I’ve taken a look at his demo and asked him to let me have my own. Not that there’s much point really but I was interested to see what it was.

So, the Pt Chevalier Real Estate blog is up!

Now, for blogging I’ve used a home made thing, pLog, Blogger and WordPress so while I may not be the most articulate or interesting blogger the world has ever seen I do know what the scripts offer.

And unfortunately this one needs a bit more work. The good thing is that if Mike’s committed to the idea he’ll put the work in to make it quite agent / realtor specific and it could be a cracker.

My wishlist:

• The urls have to be search engine friendly – http://nz.realestateforum.com/ptchevalier/blog_comment.asp?blog_id=12&month=4&year=2005&giorno=&archivio= doesn’t quite qualify
• The ability to have a status for the property – ie sold, under contract, active, withdrawn.
• I need to be able to skin my own blog – if I dare – or are you hoping people will always use you?
• Users need to be able to do a simple text search – but I think you said you were working on that.
• As well as entering my email address I should be able to enter my website address and the website address should be given and not the email. The email should only be exposed to the blog owner.
• Email addresses are not obfuscated or protected
• I have to be able to syndicate the blog and read new entries in my RSS Reader.

The less important wishlist

• The ability to set the date for the entry, I may be adding it today but it should have been up yesterday
• To be able to catalogue the entries and just see the active items, oldest first. Property Investors love to sniff round the old ones to see if there’s a bargain in the offing.
• When I highlight text and click on the link button I expect it to know that I’ve highlighted text and to show that as the link text.
• To add and entry or post you need to click “New Blog” which to me means a whole new blog – but I guess you get used to that 😉

I actually think the concept of a real estate blog could work really well, but I’m not sure if Realtors down this way would be game.

After all what if someone pointed out the negatives. Does the realtor wipe that comment? What about bickering neighbours sabotaging someones chance of getting top dollar? Or the neighbour who tells the truth about the problems a house really has?

They’d have no problems with the luvvies who say – it’s great, I wish I could buy it. Hell, they could even take their laptop, wireless modem and get visitors to sign the comments as they leave!

This would be ideal for realtors who don’t have the time or enthusiasm to maintain a proper site. The obligatory info would be entered into the corporate site, RealEnz, mls or whatever and then the more personal information could be entered here. If I can put a feed for the blog into my feed reader then it makes it easier for me to keep tabs on properties in my target area.

If Mike’s still talking to me after reading this I might even keep the Pt Chevalier one going as I know there are lots of locals who love sniffing round the open homes and commenting on the houses. It could get quite lively 🙂