It’s obvious agents are realizing the power and cost effectiveness of the WordPress platform. But brokers seem to be non existent in terms of developing comprehensive WordPress strategies.

Here are two potential strategies for a real estate brokerage to take advantage of WordPress:

  1. A full website platform for agents – For a large brokerage with thousands of agents, a website platform of your own may make sense. A custom platform would enable a brokerage to offer agents broker branded themes, automatically direct leads generated to your CRM, easily stream company news to agent dashboards, etc. Depending on how your brokerage operates, you could either provide all blogs for free to your agents if they remain on the brokerage domain (SEO juice for broker), or charge agents if they want their website on their own domain name (SEO juice for agents). Or of course you could charge agents to have a blog on the broker’s domain name, but I’m guessing you won’t get much traction if you take that approach.
  2. Hyper local blog network – a small, mid-sized, or large brokerage could create a network of hyper local sites that covers every neighborhood, city, and MSA they cover – with broker branding on all of them. All of the content from the hyper local blogs could be surfaced on the high level domain for the MSA. With a WordPress multi-site install, it’s fairly straight forward to create a number of blogs driven off the same instance. With each site having paginated IDX from Diverse Solutions and unique, relevant content being somewhat added, it’s likely the high level domain could build SEO juice relatively quickly. The hyper local sites could be an SEO investment and free for agents to use as part of being an agent with “Example Broker Northwest” or “rented” to agents on a monthly basis in which case they would be entitled to all the leads generated on that particular site.

I wrote a similar post right when WordPress 3.0 came out, but haven’t seen any brokerage innovation in the space since. Are there brokers out there that have built WordPress platforms for their agents? Why hasn’t a large brokerage blanketed their entire coverage area with hyper local blogs for each city/neighborhood — or have they and I just haven’t seen it?