A Twitter for Following Agents and Regions?
Why isn’t there a way to follow all the listing activity (new listings, price changes, pendings, solds) for regions and agents I care about with a native app?
Email listing alerts, with a Twitter-like interface (follow agents, brokers, franchises, ZIP codes, neighborhoods, cities).
For consumers, it’s a more efficient way to manage the listings alerts they care about. For agents, it’s a way to follow their competition.
This is more or less the exact same product that’s needed for the pocket listings opportunity I wrote about quite awhile ago.
With the launch of Premier Agent, Homely.com.au (who I consult for) now enables you to follow agents listing activity in Australia, though not yet inside a native app. See this for an example listing activity page.
Another attempt I came across is followit.com.au, though I clicked around a bit in Melbourne and couldn’t really find any listings or agents.
The app wouldn’t be hard to build. It’s getting the data that poses the challenge. In the United States, even with Spark and multiple vendors selling access to a standardized MLS data feed, it’s still not easy to obtain vast amounts of MLS data (read this and this from 2011).
Anyone tackling this in the US market? Abroad?
Bryn Kaufman
Posted at 14:28h, 12 FebruaryI did this many years ago in my market when Twitter was just becoming popular. I did a Twitter feed for specific areas and posted updates to this feed as they came out.
It was not a big success so I stopped doing it. The issue I noticed was you really could not define what you get as well as you can with email. For example, maybe someone wants to see homes priced between 700,000 and $1,000,000 with 5 beds min, 10,000 square foot lot min, and ocean view. This is easy to do using email, but not so easy in a twitter feed, as far as I know.
This is the same reason I don’t post listings to Facebook. People end up seeing a lot of listings that do not meet their needs, which is a waste of their time, IMO.
Drew Meyers
Posted at 14:40h, 12 February“The issue I noticed was you really could not define what you get as well as you can with email. For example, maybe someone wants to see homes priced between 700,000 and $1,000,000 with 5 beds min, 10,000 square foot lot min, and ocean view. This is easy to do using email, but not so easy in a twitter feed, as far as I know.”
Every subscription you could do with email is doable with a twitter interface. It’s just a bit of dev work, but certainly possible.
Bryn Kaufman
Posted at 14:53h, 12 FebruaryGood point, I was thinking that might be the case, but what advantage would that have over email. Email is more popular than Twitter, and it does not have text size limits, so for example the full description of the property could be included.
Not sure if Twitter users know how to filter their feeds too. For example, it is easy to say put these emails in this folder for later reading, but not sure that can easily be done in Twitter. Maybe it can, I have to admit, I do not use Twitter anymore.
Drew Meyers
Posted at 14:56h, 12 FebruaryWith time and money, anything is possible. Just because Twitter doesn’t do something, doesn’t mean you couldn’t make this app do it.
Bryn Kaufman
Posted at 14:56h, 12 FebruaryI wish there was a way to do it in Facebook.
Brian Moeller
Posted at 14:58h, 19 FebruaryYou could use hashtags on your sale posts to categorize your listings. (#homesforsale #cityname #350,000)
Stephanie Crawford @AgentSteph
Posted at 18:55h, 12 FebruaryI bet HomeSnap could implement this pretty easily in places where they have MLS data. They are already tracking everything you’d need,
Drew Meyers
Posted at 18:01h, 16 FebruaryWell there is no reason a consumer would follow an agent or brokerage. Only agents would care about doing that. So, if you mean no buyers requested that…not surprising at all to me.