Estate Agent Today

Agents can now use ‘spidering’ technology directly, to send their own property listings to any number of portals ­– putting them in control.

The breakthrough, which could pose a threat to sites that scrape property details, comes after a development by tech company XML2U.

The tool will ‘spider’ the agent’s own site daily, sending off properties and updates such as price changes. It means agents no longer have to engage in manual inputting of properties.

The service, which costs £10 a branch per month, uses Google-like technology to visit the agent’s website, collect their properties and then present them in a data file.

A link to the file can then be given to any website(s) the agent chooses for automatic upload of their properties. The link will never change but the data file it opens will be updated daily to always contain the latest information.

The portal site will access the data file on a regular basis to collect the latest information. The XML generator creates the data file in multiple formats compatible with portal sites around the world.

For those agents who already have a data file of their properties, but find the format is not accepted by the sites on which they wish to advertise, there is also a conversion service. This takes the agent’s existing data file and generating multiple formats to suit virtually any property portal.

Any pitfalls for agents? Well, perhaps it’s not a very good idea to put as a testimonial on the site one from ‘for sale by owner’ website the Little House Company, saying how they use the service to distribute their listings to lots of portals!

All the same, take a look.

http://www.xml2u.com