TheLandJournal.com

Using listing services for your rural land can generate you a lot of leads but if you’re not careful you can be burned as well.

The number of listings a site has, or claims to have, isn’t all you should take into account. Some sites just grab listings from other sites to look like they have more listings, and many of those sites list property that has already sold or been taken off the market.

Don’t make the mistake that some football fans make - don’t pick your team based on the pretty colors and how great the name is.

I’ve thrown together ‘Three Questions to Ask When Listing Your Rural Property Online:’

1. The most important question you should ask is, “Do they share or sell the leads generated from your listings with other
Realtors or Brokers?”

Many of these new farm, ranch and land websites use your listings to generate leads and then sell those
leads to other agents. Listing with sites that sell or share leads can potentially hurt your business and profits as I’m sure you know.
With the many new startup sites out there you really have to know who to trust, and nobody wants to learn the hard way.

2. The next most important thing to ask is, “What’s the current traffic across your site or network?”

It’s important to know how much exposure your listing will get. Not only the visitor amounts, but the type of traffic that will be hitting the site. It needs to be focused on potential leads, not just people passing through. If the website sends you the amount of ‘hits’ they get, make sure to reply and ask for ‘unique visitors.’ Hits mean nothing related to how many people will view your listing.

There are ways to verify for yourself how popular a site is as well. For example, go to www.google.com, type in the search box info:landsofamerica.com, or the website you’re researching. Click “Search” and a list will come up. This is how you find webpages that “contain the term” the site you searched. So click that and see how many results come up and what those results are. The more links, the better. That will give you an idea of the exposure your listings will get. Keep in mind many listing services use a network of sites along with partner sites, for example, LandsofAmerica.com for a Texas listing will also be on LandsofTexas.com you can look up that site as well and combine those results. Another tool is Alexa.com, you type in the website name and it will give you a guess of it’s traffic rank.

3. Are they going to list your contact information in the listing?

If a site doesn’t want to list your contact information, it may be because they want to control your potential leads or keep the people on their site instead of passing them to you. This isn’t beneficial to you at all, and if they say it’s to protect you from spam, there are way better ways
to control the spam without keeping customers from having immediate, direct access to YOU for YOUR listings.

Don’t always believe what you’re told or the claims you read. You can protect yourself and your rural listings by using a service that has YOUR best interests in mind. So now you can stop cringing when you get a rural land listing and start smiling, because you know the leads it will generate and how fast it will sell.