Prudential Northwest Properties is one of the largest real estate firms in the Portland area. They add over 500 agents in 20+ offices to the giant Home Services of America real estate network.  Offices include many in the Portland and Vancouver areas, the Oregon coast, and Bend area.  The company will keep its leaders and still operate under the Prudential name. Prudential Northwest Properties CEO, Jason Waugh, is excited about the opportunities and services that Home Services of America will bring his buyers, sellers, and agents.

Home Services of America further planted their seed in the Northwest by also acquiring Seattle based Prudential Northwest Realty.  They are banking on a housing recovery and have been purchasing strong real estate firms throughout the country.

The announcement comes on the heels of several other notable hires that a rounding out their Real Estate Industry Outreach team and is arguably the biggest of them in terms of notoriety in the real estate blogging and social media community.

Zillow has been controversial for years with REALTORS due to Zestimates infamous lack of accuracy and recently with the backlash against 3rd party lead generators getting more aggresive in monetizing their sites.

Some bloggers simply are OK with Jay going to work full time at Zillow. Others see it as an attempt to hire someone with the blogging street cred to lead REALTORS to the slaughterhouse. At first glance you may think that the posts have nothing in common. Except this.

Almost everyone who knows Jay (as I do, full disclosure) likes him. They wish him well. BUT. As one blogger pointed out in Brian Boero’s blog post, the jury is still out on Zillow.

We welcome your comments.

(Editor’s Note: We will be featuring some how to Tech Tips from Real Estate Tech Experts. If you have a question about how to do what is being discussed feel free to contact them. They may charge for their services, but they are writing here as a FREE service to help REALTORS with their technology and marketing.)

As many of us in the real estate marketing business know.  The playing field changes quickly and sometimes drastically.  So I am writing about the latest craze in the great mystery of Google algorithms.  The Schema codes for websites.

I am sure all you savvy real estate web marketers out there have heard about schemas.  What they are?  How can I utilize them?  How do I write them?  And do I really need them?

Well I have written a brief article that will give you a quick over view of what schemas are and how they can help in your real estate marketing campaign.

A database schema is the official language to describe the structure of the database.  It is the language that is supported and used by the Data Base Management System.  The schema labels and defines things like tables, views, fields, relationships, procedures, sequences, queues, etc.  It is essential how the user and the database communicate.

How schemas now relate to the internet, internet marketing and SEO and more overly real estate marketing is that there are several global schemas that use the same or similar markup languages.  Recently these schemas have been identified and now you are able to label them in your code by using simple HTML and CSS tags.  The advantage to this is that now you are telling the search engine what exactly some of the content on you site is.

For example let’s say you would like to let the search engines know what your business is so in the future the search engines will have this information stored in their multi-conglomerate.  With a simple schema code attached to the HTML and CSS of your webpage you can easily do this.

First you would declare to the search engines what schema format you are using with a simple piece of code like this:

<div itemscope itemtype=”http://data-vocabulary.org/Organization”>

Just drop that into the body of your HTML.  It won’t be visible to the frontend user but it lets the search engines know what you are doing.  After you have declared what you are naming (The Organization) then simply name it by using this piece of simple HTML:

<span itemprop=”name”><H1>Your Real Estate Company</H1></span>

If you wanted to embed it into the H tag simply do it like this:

<H1 itemprop=”name”>Your Real Estate Company</H1>

Both work and both are invisible to the frontend user but you have established a declaration to the search engines of valuable information concerning your company.

Now let’s move forward and declare a few other objects to the search engines.  We will start with addresses because that is really valuable to real estate marketing.  So let’s say you have a listing that you want the search engines to recognize its address.  The schema code for that would go as follows:

First tell the search engines what you are declaring with this code:

<span itemprop=”address” itemscope itemtype=”http://data-vocabulary.org/Address”>

This just tells the search engines that you are about to declare an address.  Now just point out your address to the search engines with this code:

<span itemprop=”street-address”>780 Street Address</span> – street address

<span itemprop=”locality”>North Palm Beach</span> – city

<span itemprop=”region”>Florida</span> – state

Schema codes are pretty easy, don’t you think?  Just a few pieces of code that could really make your site stand out to the search engines.  As all of you real estate marketers know staying ahead of the game is so important and with the search engines criterion changing so rapidly this form of on page optimization could vault you to the top of search engines.

Listing syndication is definitely a hot topic nowadays – and is definitely gaining momentum as persons realize the importance of their online presence.  However, there is some misunderstanding even amongst agents themselves.

The issue REALLY needs to be broken down into 2 topics:

#1  How listings should be handled with syndication/advertisement on 3rd party listing aggregation companies (such as Zillow, Trulia, etc.).

#2 How listings should be handled among cooperating licensed brokers & agents on their respective websites that are members of the same Board of REALTORs.

Many persons mistakenly are attempting to lump it all together as “all internet advertising”.  Touching on the first topic of 3rd party listing aggregation companies:  essentially, these are a 3rd party group of venture capital funded persons whose primary business model is to take Listings for “free” from agents – and then sell leads directly (through selling of buyer leads themselves) or indirectly (through featured agent/listing placement on their site).  Basically – they take something for free from agents, and then repackage it – and charge agents a fee for something that agents gave to them in the first place.

These 3rd party companies typically are not licensed to practice real estate, nor are they typically members of the local Boards of REALTORs.  This also means that they do not have to comply with the same exact rules as licensed agents that are furnishing the listings in the first place.  (Such as:  These 3rd party companies generally are able to display SOLD listing data on their site, whereas licensed real estate agents generally are not.)  This places agents at a tremendous competitive disadvantage.  They have more rules and regulations with which to comply – and yet, they are competing for the very same internet presence that the 3rd party companies are attempting to get.

As a result, many agents are wanting a more level playing field.  They feel that whatever these 3rd party sites are able to do (or not do) from a marketing standpoint, the same should be applied to agents.  For the agents that are concerned about listing syndication for the 3rd party sites:  its all about free trade, fair play in business – and a level playing field.

Additionally, many REALTORs that are primarily Listing or Seller’s Agents, are also wanting to get items added to the listings that are displayed such as Their Phone Number, Website Address, Email, Logo, Watermarking of their Photos with their Team Branding Contact Information, etc on these syndicated sites – so that customers can contact them directly without having to pay for the leads.

Editorial Note:  I personally have no issue whatsoever with additional agent branding, contact info, etc being required for use on the 3rd party syndication sites.

The 2nd half of the topic is listing syndication commonly referred to as IDX across other agents websites.  This is where the issue takes an entirely different spin.  It needs to be recognized that there are 2 types of agents:

1.  BUYER AGENTS

2.  SELLER AGENTS (aka listing agents)

Unlike the above issue, Agents are all operating on the same level playing field from a rules/regulation standpoint of marketing.   Those persons that want an internet presence to create a Buyer’s Brokerage, are free to allocate their time/resources/money toward that end.  Those persons that want to solicit listings and be a Seller’s Brokerage (listing brokerage), are free to allocate their time/resources/money toward that desired goal.

Its all about cooperating and working together for the good of the industry, and making it easy for consumers.  The addition of listing broker team branding/logos/contact information, etc – would cause the Buyer’s Agents to essentially be providing advertising for Listing Agents, as the consumer would be more likely to call the Listing Agent despite the lead being generated from the Buyer’s Agents website.

This would be fairly akin to saying:  “Buyer’s Agents should be able to place THEIR sign in the yard of listings that other agents have”.  After all, more advertisement is good for their seller, right?     It makes the exact same sense.

Listing agents already have a tremendous amount of advantages in place:  yard signs, open houses, local media advertisements, postcard mailouts, etc, etc.  Beyond the internet, what do Buyer’s Agents have that will realistically generate business in today’s market?  Very little.  The conversion numbers of customers from a postcard that says “Want to Buy a Home?  Call me.” are going to be very low, compared to what the listing agent is able to generate with advertising their listings.

If listing agents were allowed to have the additional contact information, or branding advertisements (logos, watermarking of photos, etc), this will completely segment real estate agents as a whole – because Buyers Agents will not advertise listings that have their competitors contact information on it.  What would consumers do if this happens?  This would be a tremendous blow to the industry, as it would force consumers to go to the 3rd party listing aggregation sites to find “all the listings” that are currently on the market.

The solution is to separate the topic into 2 issues.  Address them separately.  And to unite REALTORs together for the common good of the industry.