Marketing Open-Realty listings with RSS

Posted on June 18, 2007
Filed Under Real Estate News |

How to easily display Open-Realty RSS on external sites

Have you ever wanted to take your listings in Open-Realty and display links to them in external sites? Many times I’ve been asked to setup either external featured listings or RSS feeds on sites only to be surprised at how few are actually doing this.

About 4AM this morning while waiting for my updates on a site I decided to check this article off my list by doing some brief additional research on the subject. What I discovered over the past few weeks looking at this, is that sites that use the feature for marketing their listings tend to rank a bit higher than those that don’t comparatively. Now I make that statement based on search terms of course solely experimenting on listing titles.

Open-Realty has a built in RSS feature that complies with 2.0 standards providing you with a simple means of syndicating listings to external domains. The easiest of all methods I’ve experimented with uses a product called Magpie RSS. Magpie RSS is certainly not the only application of its type but it is the one I discovered to have the largest number of followers and users not to mention an arsenal of features you may likely never use.

Magpie RSS takes a naive, and inclusive approach. Absolutely non-validating, as long as the RSS feed is well formed, Magpie will cheerfully parse new, and never before seen tags in your RSS feeds. This makes it very simple support the varied versions of RSS simply, but forces the consumer of a RSS feed to be cognizant of how it is structured.(at least if you want to do something fancy) Magpie parses a RSS feed into a simple object, with 4 fields: channel, items, image, and textinput.

With easy to follow instructions and minimal skill required, any real estate site owner can publish links to RSS feeds in their Open-Realty site with relative confidence. I chose to test with cache options to explore how well it works and then tested it with Image inclusion so listing details on a remote location could also or alternatively include a photo of the listing as well. Use of photos is not advised with RSS although possible providing the server in which Open-Realty resides doesn’t prevent it.

Use the following links and resources to experiment with your own listings. I’ll write on this in greater detail this week.

MagpieRSS Display of RSS Feeds RSS Popper for MS Outlook

Comments

Leave a Comment

If you would like to make a comment, please fill out the form below.

Name (required)

Email (required)

Website

Comments


TEMP CODE: GDHXCDX17249629