My Top 10 Potential Dwellicious Possibilities

Posted on June 3, 2009
Filed Under General | 1 Comment

Social Bookmarking for The Real Estate CMS Trend.

Its only been two weeks since I was introduced to dwellicious.com by a client of ours and I’m already more than a big fan. I’m addicted to the potential possibilities that this new service can present to real estate websites. When social networking services are combined with CMS empowered web site solutions like WordPress or Joomla for instance, the climate of the web tends to change in a way that pushes beyond the old humdrum limitations that so often plague boring uneventful and likely ineffective sites. Although varying social and cms implements are really old news, its not as widely embraced in the real estate industry in part because social bookmarking of featured property listings or any listing for that matter had to be done with services not ideally suited for them. Dwellicious surfaces and gives real estate websites something unique, a way to “socialize property listings”. Why you might ask? Well I’ll get to that with my top 10 and you can see why but for now look at a few important things taking place as we go on.

Isn’t there already services available for this type of thing? The Zillows, the Postlets, the Trulias and other types of listing submission solutions do exist so why would dwellicious be unique enough to push the coolness factor? Keep in mind that those sites are not technically social sites by definition of what many consider as befitting of the category. Many real estate websites do implement social bookmarking for listings as I’m sure you have encountered. But as stated above, the methods are really not ideally suited for real estate. For this reason, I’ve given some careful consideration to point out some of the ways we have been brainstorming how Dwellicious can be used as a great tool for the real estate webmaster.

How Realtors can use dwellicious effectively!

1. Implement it!
The simple fact is, those who are currently using it in their sites, do show greater retention per visit and its my belief a greater chance of a repeat visit.

2. Use it for back links.
If someone came to you and said there is a way to have dozens or maybe even hundreds of people add your listings to their social bookmark page, would that be enough motivation to consider the potential here? Dwellicious does not implement a no-follow no-index on the listings or the individual profile pages.

3. Blog with it!
The very reason we built our two new plugins was for the marketing benefit it presents. The WordPress plugin provides a blogger with a way to implement the profile page with the listings into a page or post. Think about this for a moment. Your broker has dwellicious implemented and you decide you will go in and bookmark all of your listings to include into your blog. Could it get any more simple than that? As your listings update so too does the data on your blog. But why stop there? Mortgage lenders, business associates, clients, potential customers, press releases, and any number of potential uses could be displayed on any number of blogs.

I have a Realtor as of yesterday whom agreed to beta test our plugin by first asking her client to register at dwellicious, bookmark her listing on the Realtors site, then use our plug-in to publish the listings below a small article about the property in her blog. You were aware that properly formatted, WordPress can be made to ping dozens of relay services right? Do you see the potential here?

4. List with it!
If you are a real estate professional using Open Realty as your listings manager, you could use the new FREE add-on to present a bookmark link for each and every listing you enter into your site. The add-on is beta tested at this Myrtle Beach Real Estate site. Please note, its a slow site in part because there are modifications being performed to test multiple plugins. This addon is 100% FREE and will be released for download this Friday.

5. Feature listings with it!
You know, we built the original WP Featured to provide bloggers with the ability to feature property listings from their OpenRealty sites within their pages and posts. But what about a Realtor who does not use OpenRealty? Agents are still going to blog, and aside from having to manually enter the property in their blog to feature it, there isn’t really an ideal solution. Until NOW! I’m so happy to be able to tell my real estate clients that there is an affordable solution in hiring us to implement the Dwellicious API into their site so their agents can have blogs and feature listings easily.

How it works is this, if your real estate site has the api implemented already, an agent can setup an account at dwellicious, bookmark his or her listings, use our FREE plugin for their WordPress blog, and feature a user defined number of bookmarked listings. It gets better! The listings can be presented in a unique fashion because the display is template driven.

6. RSS with it! Don’t under estimate it!
Did you know that the dwellicious service provides an ATOM RSS feed link to your profile that you can use to place in news readers, MS Outlook, or other types of RSS rendering tools. Its the core foundation to how we implement it with our two plugins. But you can use it for any number of methods similar to the methods employed by the UltimateIDX. Realtors who maintain news letters and or listings updates will send the links in their standard subscriber service. I’ve said it countless times, if you can bridge the limitations of implementation you will have the worlds best alternative to email marketing because with RSS, you wont be blacklisted as a spammer.

7. Generate Fliers with it!
Look, this is reaching a bit, but I would bet that at some point a person will be able to visit the bookmarked listing on dwellicious and print a PDF flier of the listing complete with comps and possible demographics. If for no other reason than to have it available as a feature of the site. But if this feature surfaces, home seekers could produce a printable version of the listing with maybe your mug shot and contact details at the very top for when they do the drive by view of the property.

Having been in this business for many years I’ve heard the frustrations Realtors tell me about the loss of a sale when home seekers visit a property. What happens? Simple, the home seeker calls the number on the yard sign. Capturing that lead is essential and if you can’t collect it directly by user input, you can get it indirectly by printable flier improving your odds. Read at the end of this post below for a little more thought on this because its not really the focus but hey, I did title the post with the word “possibilities” in it right.

8. Social network with it!
Dwellicious provides ways for you to not only instantly publish a listing to a WordPress blog but share the listing with the top services in use today by the “socially responsible” (plan on words for sure).

9 and 10. Check back
I actually have a 9 and 10 but they require screen shots, so until then.

However some final things to consider. After looking back in time with that perfect 20/20 vision, I believe when social networking services like twitter and facebook among many others are considered, the evidence demonstrating the rampant trend toward social networking literally everything in our lives would seem to guarantee dwellicious a certain degree of potential success. The nice thing about dwellicious in my mind is that its new enough to be bold and based cleanly on what appears to be proven fundamentals for a great social networking and or bookmarking service. My thoughts are that for those who implement it early on could ethically and quite legitimately be considered to be trend setters or at the very least cutting edge. No pun on humor here. But when considering things having been titled cutting edge in the past, growth in popularity and privilege tend to follow those who embrace such things early on. Look at those who originally embraced facebook, myspace and now twitter, rank and fortune are sort of pseudo synonymous with their success.
(FYI, pseudo synonymous meaning not really, or not genuine but having the appearance of synonymous aka falsely synonymous but none the less synonymous. Yeah, its like that!)

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