Can anyone provide me with a few website designed for Realtors. I have contacted I-House but want to shop around. I looked at GoDaddy.com as well but not sure if they can provide me with the information I need. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

these guys seem to know what they're doing:

http://www.realestatewebmasters.com/

The one I use is point2agent but they have been slow to make improvements to their templates and menu bars. I do not know why they have not embraced css templates. They have stuck with old looking templates which seem to be driving away lots of business.

elance.com is good if you want something custom, but not that expensive. However the building of the site will be more 'hands on' and you'll likely be having a seperate company supplying the actual listings to it.

When it comes down to site selection it really depends on how much you are willing to do yourself or how much you want to do. I made my first site in 94 and could not hire some one to do one for me then or now. I would not want someone else doing it. Most website builders are designer/artist and do great designs but leave out the content.

IMO The best book written on web sites was written 20 years before the net. The author was the king of advertising and wrote the best work I have ever found on advertising. The name of the book is Ogilvy on Advertising. If you read it before you spent your cash on a site you should be able to put together a site that customers actually like.

I would look at templatemonster.com they have a section for real estate. A lot of there templates are extremely professional looking and are easy to customize.

I know several people over at realestatewebmasters.com are very happy. The downfall is that they are pricey. I hear you get what you pay for, but I just don't have the confidence to pull the trigger yet.

The truth is if you want something good, you either have to learn how to do it yourself, or pay someone to do it. Going the cheapie route will do you very little good unless you know what your're doing and can do it yourself.

Developing the website portion of the site is the easy part. Handling the database and the IDX is where things get complicated and hiring someone out makes the most since.

The real estate website vendor business must be very competitive. I get several phone calls or emails a week asking for my business.

I use the IDX from my MLS. It's not as fancy as others but it's also not expensive, and it has served me quite well - lots of times we look and look for things and something is right there under our nose. I pay a little extra for my MLS feed, and it works great. I use the feed and iframes. looks practically seamless.

Would suggest using wordpress with mimbo template - clean professional look.

Wordpress divorces you from knowing html - you can easily add content at any time with wordpress. If you are really strapped for cash wordpress.com can host for free. I would recommend using a hosting company though. Most offer easy installation of wordpress from cpanel: Fantastico

Here is an example of the mimbo template in action:
www.1stforGascony.com

Edit... my quote did not take so just see the post above.

I second the use of wordpress. Themes are like opinions and we all know what opinions are like.

Here is another example of a WordPress Realtor site.

http://www.billremington.com

I guess I could expand on my thoughts a touch...

- You can setup auto feeds via a cron job which populate your site with fresh content weekly, daily or hourly

- Easy to self update

- Cheap (WP is Free and the customization is affordable if you don't want to do it yourself)

- Tons of free Plugins and Widgets which help with search engine relevance, user experience, traffic, etc...

- Free themes which are better than many paid for themes

- Google, Bing, Yahoo LOVE Word Press.

The site I mentioned above (http://www.billremington.com) was launched 3 weeks ago and already has 1300 +/- indexed pages. The Realtor, Bill, has already seen his request for more info increase as well as requests for his newsletters. Yadda yadda yadda.

Anyway, these days you can get all of this done for relatively cheap ($1000+/-) if you do not want to do it yourself. However, and I say this as someone who does and charges for web services like this, you can do it yourself if you have time and the willingness to learn something new.

mY411 - not sure about using autocron jobs to pull content.

It is duplicate content - google will pick it up eventually

Hey franophile - Google actually picks it up relatively quickly. However, they are becoming more cooperative with duplicate content which is not deceptive and with the intent of bettering ones page rank or organic position. Checkout "Canonicalization." Google Webmaster tools has a great writeup on it.