Recently Realtor.com announced a free blogging platform is now available for their 1.4 millionish members.

LOS ANGELES, Aug. 28 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — REALTOR.com, the most comprehensive real estate listings Web site, today announces the introduction of Featured Blog and “Let’s Talk Real Estate!,” a new blogging program on REALTOR.com developed to help REALTORS make quality connections with consumers, demonstrate their local expertise and expand their client base.

So off I went to check it out…

Registering here is quick and painless (you’ll need your NRDS ID number, but there is a lookup available). And within minutes you can indeed have a blog set up — a blank slate just waiting for you to blog your heart away.

The “back end” of your Featured Blog is a very dumbed down version of the WordPress Dashboard. There are no themes to chose from, though you can select from 24 headers (or add your own). You can also select whether to display your sidebar on the right or left side of the page. Sidebar widgets are enabled, though very limited and for the life of me, a relatively tech-savvy person, I can’t figure out how to add functional links to the sidebar — eliminating the possibility of adding a blogroll, links to your main website, etc.

One plug-in — Spam-blocker 1.0 — comes installed and activated. I believe this is a proprietary plug-in as I can’t find it available as a stand alone WordPress plug-in. There is no way to adjust any settings, nor can you see what has been blocked. No white/gray/black list. I guess you have to trust that it’s optimized and working.

According to the press release, Featured Blog is:

Designed for non-technical users who don’t know HTML, Featured Blog was developed to be easily created, managed and “owned” by each agent or broker. They can be used as a stand-alone website page or within a personal web site, and branded with the “owners” contact information, photos, links, logos, and banner image. . . . Only visitor comments approved and posted back to a blog by the “owner” will be visible for others to read.

I find the statement they can be used, “within a personal web site” incredibly misleading as the integration option only works with realtor.com Featured Website URLs. The blogs are indeed easily created. It sounds like you can make the blog look unique, but with only 24 graphic headers and no capability to add plug-ins, the fact is these blogs all look basically the same.

Comment approval is interesting. I tested the system by entering a comment as a user. As the owner I was immediately notified via email that a comment was posted. A few minutes later, I got an email that a comment needed to be moderated. This could be confusing to a new (or experienced) user.

After logging in to the dashboard and clicking through, I see this:

Cool! Says the new user and clicks on “Awaiting Moderation”. I did, and got this:

Huh? Apparently my comment has been sucked into Never-Never Land. (Note I tried a second time and it worked fine. But my original comment is nowhere to be found.)

So purely from a functional standpoint, the Realtor.com Featured Blogs are easy to set up and get running. Comment management is suspect, and true individuality is virtually impossible.

I think I’ll hold off on a dissertation from the philosophical standpoint. In short, I do have a concern that through ease-of-use and trumped up “blogging wave” marketing, people are going to be headed to realtor.com blogs in droves. Heck, their own press release loudly proclaims:

REALTORS will find it easy to jump into the blogosphere on REALTOR.com.

There is a LOT more to successful real estate blogging than just “jumping in”. There will be some (possibly significant) traffic to these blogs if for no other reason than realtor.com gets a bazillion visits. If the majority of the blogs present little more than mindless blather, “here’s my listing” and “I’m a Top Producer!” to the consumers visiting the site, the entirety of the real estate blogiverse could be impacted. Let’s just say a partial peek at some of the blogs showcased on the site don’t do anything to ease my concerns. Is this some of the best blogging out there?

“If you have information to share that does not fit into any of the other categories, you may place it here. Then I can set up a new category and more the comments to the appropriate place.”

Or how about:

“Get excited about your new house and let the mortgage people worry about the details of which company actually closes your loan. No matter what, it will close.”

Dustin Luther, Director of Interactive Marketing with Move.com, is spearheading this thing. If anyone can pull it off, he can. But I wouldn’t want his job right now…

Jonathan Dalton, Athol Kay, and The Real Estate Bloggers have all opined on this “philosophical aspect” of realtor.com’s Featured Blog platform. They should be required reading for anyone considering this approach.