RSS and Real Estate

My good friend Kip and I talk about RSS and it's coming impact on business often. While Kip is fairly new but aggressive in the blogosphere, I on the other hand have been blogging for almost 5 years now. January on 2001 is when I made my first weblog post.I don't use or have access to posts from years past but it would be nice. That got me thinking... what about archiving RSS/ATOM feeds for future reference. I mean it is only XML text, it's not like we need to real post. Of course if you only share an excerpt then you could have a problem.

I recommend you create a second feed that contain all your posts and off load it somewhere for safe keeping (you could also offer this feed as an archive online for your readers.) If you ever think you might change blogging software or hosts or you can't export post from your blogging software then this is a great alternative.

Thinking at this from a business perspective, there are a lot of things you could archive in static RSS feeds; company reports, old articles and white papers, podcasts (you are podcasting, right?) and many other things.

Now to the part where RSS and Real Estate meet. As the real estate business continues to change and more information is online, Realtors should look at ways to stay informed with the smallest amount of effort. Enter RSS. I am going to coin phrase here (Kip, are you listening?), I'm going to call it Real Estate 2.0. The web has it's 2.0, so does software, and there is Business 2.0 and 2.0 version of just about everything. But I think we are just about to release Real Estate 2.0. As the baby boomers become less and less interested in purchasing real estate we can turn a larger portion of our marketing budget and efforts to the GenX crowd. This is the next major generation to make large investments in Real Estate. And most of them have grown up with computers as part of their every day lives.

Real Estate 2.0 will consist of many technologies and I think RSS will be an important one. Personally I'm in the process of bringing a new technology to market using RSS that will make real estate information on the Internet consistent and valuable. Because as agents we must make our services valuable or we won't be around very long.

I believe the days of it being just about "you" are pretty much gone. When a perspective buyer can get about 90% of the data they need to make a purchasing decision online, it only means one thing, if you aren't in some way offering valuable services via the Internet to the GenX crowd you will begin to lose market share. I don't care what you are doing right now; it isn't going to work very much longer.

In a future post, probably the next one, I'm going to talk about websites and why agents grossly over state their success and how you can overcome that. My job will be to help you, with real world practical experience begin to make a move towards Real Estate 2.0, and the closer I get to releasing this new RSS technology I will begin to share the vision and the value which you can use to build a larger consistent and profitable lead generation system, all using RSS.

** Update 12/18/2005 **
I was lurking through my RSS reader tonight and came across this post on Freshblog. I have used many of the hacks from this site. Anyway, John talks about using OPML as a standard way of importing/exporting blog content. I wanted to update this post since I basically bring up the same point. Anyway, here is the post.