First Look at ListingPress by Jason Benesch at the Tomato

I’m honored to have had the opportunity to have worked with those at the Real Estate Tomato before the vine had even begun to sprout.  From that experience, I’ve been able to weasel my way into being one of the first real estate bloggers to test drive the new controversial Wordpress real estate MLS data driven plugin created by Jason Benesch Web Design–who is also a partner of Jim Cronin at the Tomato.  Founded by Jim Cronin, the Real Estate Tomato has made a huge influence on my efforts in blogging about downtown Seattle condos.

How did it begin?

At the end of 2001, I still to this day boast about the opportunity I was awarded by taking on an entry level sales position at Z57 Internet Solutions–a real estate website template company.  Today, I still have and generate qualified leads from my Z57 website due to my impenetrable search engine placement.  After cold calling for 5 years and selling over 600 websites, my demo site was generating emails and calls for Seattle condos while still at Z57 in San Diego, that I was left with no choice but to move back to Seattle and try real estate on my own.  I made my first sale from a lead I generated off that site.  However, I’m honestly not much of a Realtor.  At the time, I was still wearing Circa skate shoes with a suite, and driving buyers around in a 1966 Cutlass.  Therefore, I think much of that prevented me from being a successful agent.  In the process of borrowing listings from agents in the area I was interested in farming (downtown Seattle), I met another agent who was genius enough to offer me a good salary to handle his Internet marketing exclusively.  Although I was first nervous about being able to prove my efforts profitable, I can confidently say it’s time for a raise.

Our His business has exploded!

At the same time, I have to attribute most of our sales success and local recognition to the impression our Wordpress blog has made.  It took awhile to convince this agent I was hired to work with allow me to tackle the concept of blogging, and many agents today still have a lot of reasons why they don’t want to take advantage of it.  Now, since blogs have made such an impact on an agents business who have jumped on the bandwagon years ago, it’s even more difficult for those who stalled to catch up.

Already a pro-blogger and not scared?  You should be!

Today, with the up-and-coming release of ListingPress, those who waited will now have a 2nd chance to catch up!  Especially here in Washington State, we’re limited to 3 MLS data feeds that can be designated to a particular IDX provider.  Therefore, taking advantage of the SEO benefits listing press offers will be extremely difficult if we can’t convince agents in our office using one provider to cancel the download agreement so that we can then dedicate it to ListingPress.  Therefore, another agent looking to compete with a brokerage that offers an available IDX feed can literally destroy our indexed posts in Google (currently 393 content rich written posts).  With Listing Press, another blog can manipulate new listing feeds to provide that many posts within a matter of days while 1 of our article based posts can take a couple hours to just write.

Excited to compete with us ‘real’ bloggers?

Whoa!  Hold the phone!  Listing Press is no frameable IDX feed.  Your template company or local guy may throw their hands in the air after getting familiar with just setting up your new blog that more than likely has no content.  However, if you’re hobby is Wordpress and you do real estate to just pay the bills, your heart just may skip a beat when you continue to see the SEO benefits and branding opportunity ListingPress will give you.  Although our current IDX provider is what we believe to be the best in Seattle, we still don’t have control over the data feed.  So, if we want some custom tools created, we’re really at the mercy of his availability.  Now I’m not saying I have every right to have our provider create every custom feature we request overnight, Listing Press allows me, the Internet guru to go ahead and create those myself overnight.  How?

ListingPress does a ton of cool things, here are a couple.

1. Easily allows a real estate agent to combine listings with post articles that have been written on their blog.
2. Easily allows a real estate agent to add Search For Homes widgets to their sidebar.
3. Rewrites permalinks to allow for the best SEO results.
4. Puts the agent in control of how listings are displayed on site.

Wordpress is soooooooooooooo easy

Sure it is.  In fact I wrote a song about my job as a blogger and it’s titled “Copy and Paste.”  It’s only 5 lines, but I think you’ll find it catchy.

Copy and paste
Copy and paste
First I copy, and then I paste
Sometimes I paste, and then copy
But I mostly just copy, and then paste.

However, when becoming more of a savvy blogger, you’re not just copy and pasting.  You’re now editing code and installing javascript manually rather than pluging it in.  With Listing Press, your first task will be creating a new page template (fairly easy) as well as creating a “loop” that will feed new content onto your blog real time.  Over the next day or two, I’ll be providing step-by-step instruction for creating a loop and adding it to your page template.  Listing Press will require you create 2 new page templates so that you can feed listings and provide a real estate based search.  If you would like to get a head start, here are some Google search results for tutorials on creating a Wordpress Loop.