One way to quickly gain broad exposure is through syndication, or the automatic distribution of a listing to multiple websites.  vFlyer is one of a number of online services that automatically submits listings to online marketplaces and classifieds sites.  In this post, we’ll break down the various sites to which we syndicate and give you an idea of the exposure our platform can yield.

vFlyer partner site traffic in millions of viewers each month:*

1. Google Maps 35.8
2. Indeed 12.6
3. Yahoo! Real Estate 6.4
4. Zillow 5.1
5. Trulia 4.1
6. Simply Hired 4.0
7. Oodle 3.9
8. eBay Classifieds 3.7
9. Backpage 2.8
10. AOL Real Estate 1.4
11. FrontDoor 1.4
12. OLX 1.2
13. Vast 0.9
14. HotPads 0.9
15. Geebo 0.25
16. Cyberhomes 0.12
17. Jobalot 0.11

*Traffic data from Compete.com. Compete compiles data from a panel of over 2 million consumers – read about their methodology here.

You might be asking yourself, why are vFlyer listings showing up on Google Maps? About a year ago, real estate and rental listings submitted to Google Base were integrated into Google Maps as part of the retiring of Google Base’s search interface.  So while vFlyer continues to send a data feed to Google Base, housing listings now appear on Google Maps. There’s even a separate real estate search option in Maps that allows you to find real estate and rentals in a particular area.

Second on the list with a whopping 12 million unique views per month is the job site Indeed, a job “aggregator” site that, unlike some large job boards (e.g., Monster.com), has recently enjoyed tremendous growth.  An emphasis on search engine optimization has allowed Indeed to capture a huge amount of traffic straight from Google, and for vFlyer users looking to hire, this is good news… indeed.

Getting back to real estate, let’s have a look at the top five real estate-specific sites on the list.  Yahoo! Real Estate comes in first with 6.4 million viewers, Zillow is second with 5.1 million, Trulia third with 4.1 million, AOL Real Estate fourth with 1.4 million, and FrontDoor fifth with 1.4 million.

With the exception of AOL Real Estate, all of these sites show overall growth in the year 2010, with Trulia up 1.17 million unique views per month, and Yahoo! Real Estate up 1.16 million compared to this month last year.  These are companies that, despite a poor housing market, have continued to gain traffic by improving their portals and enabling online consumers with more information.  With Yahoo! Real Estate and Zillow recently teaming up, Yahoo! Real Estate has gotten a nice boost in listings, and Zillow has become an absolute must for syndication.  Combined, traffic on these two sites challenges Realtor.com, the longtime leader in the space.

Let’s now take a look at some of the broader online marketplaces and classifieds sites to which vFlyer syndicates: Oodle, with 3.9 million unique views per month, eBay Classifieds (3.7 million), Backpage (2.8 million), OLX (1.2 million), and Vast (0.9 million).

Check out eBay Classifieds (shown in red), with a stratospheric jump of over 3.6 million monthly visits in the past year.  As many vFlyer users will recall, this site used to be known as Kijiji.  While the name remains in Canada, Kijiji USA was rebranded as eBay Classifieds at the end of March.  This seems to have been an effective move by eBay (note the difference between March and April), and with a parent site (eBay.com) ranked #22 worldwide by Alexa, there’s reason to believe eBay Classifieds will continue to grow in the near future.

To put this all in perspective, let’s look at Craigslist.  With nearly 60 million visitors last month, Craigslist is the undisputed king of classifieds sites.  This should come as no surprise to most of you, but the magnitude of difference between traffic on a top real estate site like Trulia and Craigslist is quite staggering.  Just for fun, let’s throw in Facebook and Twitter as well.

These are three of the top 10 sites in the US (according to Alexa): Facebook at #1, Twitter at #9, and Craigslist at #10. To answer the question I posed earlier, these are now the most important places to establish oneself online.  But let’s not discount the other classifieds sites we reviewed.  Diligent Craigslist posting and staying on top of the social media game take a big chunk out of one’s marketing resources (read: time).  Syndication is the proverbial low-hanging fruit of online marketing.  While these sites alone may not generate the number of leads you might get from posting regularly to Craigslist, they still account for a huge amount of online traffic; having your listings syndicated to them by vFlyer allows you to “pluck the fruit”, and leaves you time to focus on building your audience through Facebook, Twitter, and your blog.

I’ll finish with another question: what role does listing syndication play in your online marketing?  And are there any other classifieds sites that you’d like vFlyer to syndicate to?  (Sorry, Craigslist is not an option.)

I’m excited to announce that vFlyer has integrated with Realty DataTrust’s VaultWare product. The alliance between vFlyer and VaultWare makes it even easier for property managers who use VaultWare to promote their available units on Craigslist as well as other online marketplaces where vFlyer automatically submits listings. Through this partnership, individual flyers will automatically be created for each floor plan offered by the property through a daily content feed from VaultWare. Pricing updates and other content changes made within VaultWare will automatically be applied to the flyers each time the content feed is processed. The flyers and the Craigslist-compatible HTML code generated by vFlyer will also include a link for users to check availability, reserve, and pre-qualify for apartments online via VaultWare directly from Craigslist.

If your company or apartment community is already using VaultWare, the new vFlyer-VaultWare product offers you a comprehensive content management and online marketing solution. By generating content from the data in VaultWare, vFlyer maximizes the efficiency of advertising your available units online.

Realty DataTrust Corporation, located in Scottsdale, Arizona, offers online leasing solutions for the multifamily housing industry that help consumers reserve apartments online and increase a property’s efficiency and occupancy rates. VaultWare is Realty DataTrust’s innovative service that integrates rental data into ILS systems, updates the data on the ILSs automatically, and allows prospective tenants to view available rentals in real time.

If you would like to learn more about the new vFlyer-VaultWare integration, please contact our sales team at 1-800-594-5930 or sales@vflyer.com.

Also, we tag any visitor to your website that clicks an affiliate link with a 60-day cookie, which means that if someone clicks your affiliate link or banner ad and then signs up for vFlyer within 60 days, you’ll still earn a commission.

If you have a website, blog, or other web property and are interested in promoting vFlyer and making some extra money, sign up to be a vFlyer affiliate! If you have any questions, please contact affiliate@vflyer.com.

Stacey Wilson at George & Co., Realtors

Leonardo Pareja at Express Realty Services LLC 

Urbane Apartments

Patrick and Julie Essig at Vine Property Group

This branded header was designed by graphic designer Anna Hatcher

Matt Jerome at Minnesota Rental Houses

Aren’t they cool? The great thing about the new Theme Editor is that it opens up the possibilities for customizing the design of your Flyers and makes putting your branding front and center on your Flyers easier than ever, as these examples show.

As I wrote last week, vFlyer Starter members and above can upload custom header images to the Theme Editor, create custom themes with them, and use those custom themes in their Flyers. It’s a fantastic new feature that makes the vFlyer service even more valuable to anyone who wants to distinguish his or her online marketing content from the rest.

Finally, I also want to mention that, with our introduction of over 25 new real estate broker themes, we’ve seen a large number of our members create Flyers using these themes. We love a little competition here and there so we’ve been keeping track of how many of each broker theme have been used by our members. The leader? Alain Pinel Real Estate, followed by RE/MAX, Keller Williams, Coldwell Banker, and Century 21. Congratulations to Alain Pinel! Now we’ll see if one of the other brokers can take the top spot in the next week…

Here’s an example of the new print version:

We hope this makes using vFlyer even easier. If you have feedback for us on the new dashboard, let us know.

DotHomes is a real estate search engine with European roots. It is the first consumer-facing product of BytePlay, a London-based search technology company. The site is unique in that it lets consumers quickly search for real estate across multiple countries including the United Kingdom, South Africa and most recently the United States. Although it may be new to some Americans, dotHomes has a huge following overseas. It has the largest database of estate agent listings in South Africa and the second largest in the United Kingdom. We applaud dotHomes on their move into the US market and are happy to have them as a distribution partner! vFlyer users can syndicate their real estate listings to dotHomes by simply selected them as destination marketplace in the Automatic Submissions section of their flyers.

Tags: Real+Estate, Realtors, dotHomes, vFlyer

Tags: real+estate

vFlyer now syndicates your Residential For Sale and Rental Property listings to Yahoo! Classifieds (Yahoo! Real Estate).

Adding Yahoo! to your list of automatically syndicated marketplaces is easy! Simply click Enable Partner Sites (located in the Automatic Submission area of your vFlyer) to select Yahoo! and other new distribution partners such as Zillow, HotPads, and Backpage. Once you have added new partners they will continue to appear under Automatic Submission.

As I mentioned in my round up of new partners, vFlyer now syndicates real estate listings to the very popular real estate site Zillow. Many of you know Zillow as the home real estate valuation service. The idea is simple, You type in the address of a property and find out its Zestimate, an approximation of a home’s market value!

Last year Zillow announced they are going to begin accepting listings from real estate professionals and essentially entered into the real estate classified ad marketplace business! The move made a lot of sense given that 50% of their 4 million monthly visitors are in the market to buy or sell a house. Their syndication service has been up and alive for several months and Zillow has done a great job of integrating agent and broker listings into their search results.

For vFlyer users, syndicating to Zillow is easy! I previously talked about how you can add Zillow and other new real estate partners to your list of available marketplaces. Simply create a flyer (or edit an existing one), add Zillow to the list of marketplaces you automatically want your listing syndicated to, click the publish or re-publish button and you are done! You have put in your full days work and you can go home and wait for the phone to ring!

Example:
Here is an example of what a vFlyer that has been syndicated to Zillow looks like:

• vFlyer: $129,900 3 Bdrm, Updated Cape Cod
• Zillow Listing: 506 W James St Columbus, WI 53925, Map View