Greetings All -

I am a web developer with 11 years of experience and am looking for feedback on an idea that I've been developing in order to help realties, especially smaller ones. I'm having trouble getting my ideas across to the real estate professionals that I'm trying to reach and help.

I'll spare you as much technogargon as possible and offer a demo that I hope will illustrate. First, a brief overview... We take an RSS feed and convert it to standard text that can be displayed within any HTML document. Why is this a big deal? Okay, again, my goal was to assist a smaller realty with a relatively small group of agents. A realty creates an RSS feed featuring their listings. They don't even have to have a live website, just a place to upload and house the .rss file. One person could easily manage this task. Once uploaded/published/broadcasted (choose your term) any website that has the special snippet of code embedded within it automatically receives and displays these updated listings. After an update is uploaded all of the agents who have a website, any website, could have updated listings instantaneously, without any work at all, as long as the code snippet is embedded within their document which is a one time procedure.

Live demo:
I'm using a feed from ZipRealty - http://www.ziprealty.com/rss/subscribe.j...FdistrictId%3D1
If you go here and click the "Subscribe now using feed://" button you will see the raw RSS feed output. I don't know if you have ever viewed a raw feed, but it looks like a long string of garbage text.
Next, go to the demos I've created bearing in mind these were designed for functionality only:
http://metroatlantahomes.com/ziprealty/index_1.html
http://metroatlantahomes.com/ziprealty/index_2.html - This is basically the same, but utilizing a different CSS to demonstrate flexibility.

These demos I've created are displaying the RSS feed from the link above at ZipRealty.com and are updated in real time whenever ZipRealty performs an update on their end. If you compare the raw feed from ZipRealty to that being displayed in my demos you'll see they are the same. ZipRealty has chosen to publish their feed without any images, but images can be included if desired. Additionally, there are other applications for real estate that can be imagined utilizing this technology, but I'll leave it here.

I'm a computer jockey without a great deal of real estate knowledge, perhaps I'm misunderstanding something and if so, please, let me know. As I see it, a smaller realty with a limited number of agents could benefit from having fresh listings without the agents or their webmaster having to perform manual updates. Again, as I see it from my perspective,... agents sell properties and the more exposure a listing gets the better opportunity to transition that particular property. I've reviewed many, many agent sites whereby many have unorganized listings, outdated listings or in many cases no listings at all.

Also, unrelated, I own MetroAtlantaHomes.com .org and .info and am searching for partners to develop. I've owned these names for a long time having registered the ".com" back in early 2000. I originally registered it to develop with an old friend of mine who was in the real estate business at the time. Long story short, they were transferred away before we could get it launched. All of the domains are indexed within the major search engines with the ".com" being around the #10 result out of 5+ million results for the search phrase "metro atlanta homes" at Google - http://www.google.com/search?q=metro+atlanta+homes The domains receive traffic and I regularly receive requests to sell the names, but I don't want to do that. Looking at the various lawn realty signs many agents have opted for domains like "thejohnsonteam.com" or something like that which is fine if used on other printed marketing materials, but if you're trying to capture one of the many thousands of perspective home buyers who are blindly searching for "metro atlanta homes" there is no better Internet address to have.

Thanks for your time.

I-O

I know what you are trying to do as I use rss feeds from one of my websites. In my case though, I use article snippets to help promote the website. I use a parser to include the rss from my articles pages to display on the index page, http://www.rentals365.com
I also promote the rss feeds to various rss search engines.

RSS feeds are a great way to distribute information around the web, but I find that outside the web developer community, take up is very limited. I think most website owners find it difficult to understand, let alone implement.

This is a good idea that you have, and I think that if you want it to take off, then you will have an uphill struggle.

Thanks for posting. I like the idea of using RSS as a dynamic way of adding content, I have another thread where I've used CaRP - Caching RSS Parser and have tried it out on a few sites with great success recently I just hit #3 in google for domain incubation

I haven't figured out how to get clean RSS feeds. No offense to Zip Realty but I don't want their ads even close to my website.

What would be cool is to figure a way to convert IDX information into various RSS feeds that would motivate people to click on the listing in the feed for more information and then go into an expanded listing (just like Zip's).

So, if you've figured out a cost-effective way of doing what Zip is doing (converting IDX info into an RSS feed, I think you have hit on a winner.

Feel free to contact me offline, my info is in my profile.

IO
Thanks for the email, I look forward to talking with you. For the benefit of the group and hopefully I can get some input from the group. Has anyone taken an IDX feed to create an RSS feed out of it? I looked closer at the Zip feeds and these are only their inhouse listings.
I missed reading a key sentence in your first posting A realty creates an RSS feed featuring their listings. They don't even have to have a live website, just a place to upload and house the .rss file.

That is a critical point

I talked to one IDX provider and they said the the MLS provider would not allow us to do this. I'm not sure what the heartburn would be since we would limit the basic amount of information in the RSS feed and provide more information after they clicked on it just like we do with our San Diego Real Estate Site .

Anyone out there done this yet?
What problems would I encounter?

Thanks in advance team!
Kevin

If any of you have a feed to publish please feel free to add it here: GeorgiaRealEstateRSS.com

No reciprocal link or anything else required.

I created this web site because all the other RSS type sites seemed cumbersome to me. I hope you find this one a bit more user friendly and will consider submitting your RSS feed for inclusion. All 50 States, Canada and International are welcome.