Social Networks and Blogging Grow in Real Estate

...Call it AGM: Agent Generated Media. A crop of sites have come on board to allow real estate agents to discuss local regions, form professional communities, post insights and help sell properties. While traditional real estate ad venues like newspaper classifieds continue to lose market share in the face of free listings sites such as Craigslist and Google Base, these social networking tools and communities, as well as a newly-launched free listings syndication system, could serve to shake up real estate advertising even more.
Until now, real estate portals have featured home listings and little else. Local real estate resource and marketing platform Localism aims to change that. The beta site geographically categorizes data posted by the 13,000 members of the ActiveRain Real Estate Network, a seven-month-old, free online community for real estate professionals. Another beta real estate portal, RealTown will let agents create free blogs, and will publish opinions and information originally posted to listservs by "agents in the trenches," according to Frances Flynn Thorsen, marketing director of Realty World Broker Network and editor for the site. Better known sites are also incorporating social networking features. Yahoo Real Estate has incorporated Yahoo Answers, letting users post questions or read responses to inquiries related to a search location, such as, "Where can I find a cheap quality house around Orlando, Fl?"...

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