Don’t under estimate Craigslist when it comes to Real Estate.

Again Windermere is leading the industry when it comes to online marketing. Recently we ventured into a partnership with an amazing company called ubadoo. Ubadoo unlike companies like postlets and others has a unique value proposition when it comes to listing aggregation.

As real estate professionals it is our responsibility to represent each property as best as we possible can. In many cases listing aggregators do not understand this part of our business and tend to sale the agent on the idea that taking a listing and pushing it out to every possible real estate portal on the Internet seems to be a good idea. That would be similar to 5 years ago trying to advertise your listing in every news paper that existed.  It may sound appealing but with the Internet today we know where the real estate audience is located and so lets be calculated and smart about how we advertise. Ubadoo gets this and so it seems to be a good fit between the two companies, Ubadoo and Windermere.

Ubadoo has the most sophisticated listing push tools for craiglist. What I have found amazing in the short time we have been working with ubadoo is the traffic that craigslist generates above and beyond large real estate portals like Google and Yahoo, and Trulia. Not to discount these sites at all they are truly important to the whole online marketing campaign but none the less I’m just amazed at the concentrated traffic generated by Craigslist.

here are some interesting numbers you that might surprise you.

Daily we feed  Trulia, Google, and Yahoo around 37,000 listing of which the click through traffic is as follows (time frame 6/5 to 6/11)

Google base is about 19,000 click trough’s

Trulia is at 3,410

Yahoo real estate is 6,320

Now craigslist is an opt in tool so we do not send all listing there.  The listing count on Craigslist of Windermere listings is 10,482 yet our click through traffic is 23,461,

over 4000 more click troughs than google with less listings.

For those of you who are more visual here is a graph to show what I’m talking about

Windermere is always looking at how we can do the best job of marketing our listings to the world. Google, Trulia, Yahoo Real Estate are all important and now we add craigslist to that mix. Stay tuned as we are looking to bring on some more great portals in the very near future.

This tool is just another advantage that a seller would have by working with a Windermere agent.