What does the Localism Real-Estate Revolution Mean?

As of July 9th Active Rain opened up “The New Localism”, which has been in beta with ActiveRain for a while. The marketing for the site is that it will be a “revolution in real-estate”.

In the past, while localism was in beta, you had to join Active Rain to be able to post articles to specific areas. They purportedly are opening this feature up to the public, but as of this morning the Register section says that “We’re not taking new accounts right now — sorry! “. Not sure why they made such a hoopla about opening up the platform to the public…but then not open them up at launch.

Localism Appeal

The platform is much cleaner and “2.0” feeling than when it was in it’s beta stage.

They had a clunky picture of the united states that served as a launch point into the communities. I do like the way that they’ve added a good search utility to access the geographic areas more efficiently.

the old localism homepage

What’s this sponsorship stuff?

Localism Sponsorship banner

Active rain and Localism are releasing a sponsored position per area in the range of $7-$15 a month. The reasoning behind it? According to Jonathan Washburn from Active Rain

We realized that the Localism community and city pages would rank much higher with the search engines if they had some component of static content, and after much deliberation we decided that selling sponsorships for this component would be the fairest and easiest way to get this content created.

So what’s included in the Localism sponsorship? Well it will be “static’ content on a specific community page. You get to write and provide the content and pictures. You get your own picture, contact information, link to your blog, and it looks like 3 outbound links. Obviously the value for website owners looking for local relevance can purchase the links and get the juice from the locally relevant page flowing to their site. You can also register a free account (soon I guess) and start posting content under your profile.

The Downside

Real estate agents and the real estate industry is a market of individuals, and in the past, individual agent’s websites dominated the search engine results. However, with more technology rolling out, start up companies with venture capital are making themselves felt. This is an opportunity for a larger company to harness User Generated Content to increase their search engine rankings, and even charge people to write their content for them (Sponsorship). Localism will then potentially start ranking for geographic areas, pushing out the real estate agents who are contributing. It is also to be seen if the links included in the sponsorship are seen by Google as “Selling Links”.