Of course this one....perhaps trulia, zillow, realtor.com

what else?

Anyone have any ideas?

many thanks!

It really depends what you're focused on default properties or new homes

a list of websites = fish

agentsonline.net = knowing how to fish

I'd like to think my site is :)

Just kidding... Realtor.com should be the most important (based on traffic)

http://www.semrush.com/info/realtor.com

Trulia, zillow, realtor.com are important sites only in a nation sense. In individual markets they may have little or no importance. A good local site can be more important for marketing a property than any of the national sites.

I'd say it depends on what perspective you're looking from. If looking from your own perspective as a Realtor, the most important website out there is your own. ;-)

I like sites that help me to focus on my geographical area. Recently I've discovered some features with Zillow that have helped connect me with local people and particular properties. The ability to leave comments about a particular property is a great feature.

try activerain, biggerpockets, etc

I like Activerain and Trulia the best for blogging. Realtor.com is good for enhanced listings. I did their community billboard thing for a year and it didn't get me any closed clients, just drove traffic to my website. I don't know what bigger pockets is. An investing forum I'm guessing, to lazy to look. Craigslist peaks my interest and makes me want to look into it a bit more since it's free.

How do you see the differences in positioning between the various networking and discussion sites for real estate professionals?

Are there any others that should be included, apart from the three in the subject line here?

Dan

P.S. This doesn't seem to best belong under "Webmaster Issues" but this is where the thread is. :-)

Although I like active rain, the fact that the backlinks are nofollow (at least for new accounts now) makes me shy away from it. I'm not familiar with brokeragentsocial but I would suggest realestateforum as it is full of great information.

If you pay up for activerain the blog backlinks are not nofollow.. Of course I'm not 100% convinced they are worth the money.

You may want to check to make sure that individual blogs within various real estate communities are still being included in Google's index - thoroughly check out a few of the blogs before making a decision.

When I am checking, I am finding that quite often the individual blogs are suffering - especially when the content is also being fed into the main homogeneous site blog and/or displayed on the home page for example. Perhaps Google sees the duplication and elects only to list the version in the more authoritative site blog.

Great for the community site owner but not for the REALTOR.

Doug, I'm not sure I quite understood what you meant. So if somebody posted on activerain and then posted the same on their homepage, ar is getting the credit, right?

That is not really what I was referring to although that would be a duplication issue as well.

I was referring to some blog communities - not AR specifically - where when someone writes a blog post in their blog within the site - that post then also appears in the main "communty" blog that aggregates all of the blog posts made by members - no doubt to show how active the community is etc. In those cases Google seems to just list the version in the community blog while the member's personal blog does not get listed.

Active Rain just shows snippets of blog posts on their front pages not the whole blog post so one would think that duplication is not a problem - and it probably isn't. Members' blogs and posts do get listed in Google.

However, Active Rain does have its own issues. Most use Active Rain blogs because they are under the impression that the blogs rank well in Google. That is not necessarily the case.

Go to Active Rain and pick a member's blog at random - preferably the blog of a member who has been posting for a few years so Google has no excuse for not knowing where the posts are. Then pick posts at random going back from recent posts to ones that are years old. That is what I did and I found that there are more blog posts not even listed in Google at all than ones that are listed. (Use Google's "cache:" command for this - do not use the Google Toolbar's search box to search for a url as it bypasses the search engine and takes one directly to the url - which fools many into thinking a page is listed in Google when it is not.)

To me that says that if one is blogging there because they think their blog is going to rank well in Google they may be wasting their time. Many of the posts either will not be listed or will eventually be dropped from Google if they once were listed.

Not to pick on AR - other communities are worse. Just do some checking on your own. When others say that their blogs rank great etc.etc. - check it out on your own and keep checking every once in a while because small changes in a communities structure can have big consequences in Google (rarely for the better).

In my opinion the best place to spend blogging efforts is in your own properly set up Wordpress blog.

Great points, Doug. Initially I thought about making a big effort on AR to help promote my site, but now I will focus on a hosted wordpress blog.

It depends on what kind of information you are looking for.