We have produced many videos for high-end homes.  However, I believe that starter homes and affordable condos receive the most benefit from marketing with our Openhouse videos.  The size of the market for properties less than $1,000,000 far exceeds the number of buyers interested in luxury homes.  Because of the size of the market for less expensive homes is so large, anything that can set a listing apart from the masses will be directly benifical to the listing agent.

Mark Longpre, for example, was our first client to recognize that our services were not just for premium homes.   Our first video we produced for Mark was for a listing of a $200,000 condo in East Vancouver that had been on the market for 6 weeks.  He was hoping that the video could inject some excitement into his listing.  Within 2 weeks of having a video produced and marketed, Mark was able to double-end the sale.  He has gone on to have great success with our videos.  Thanks Mark for seeing the value in our services.

Here are Mark’s videos:

402 – 570 E 8th Avenue
1316 – 4655 Valley Drive
302 – 2133 Dundas Street
26 – 1203 Madison Avenue

I am going to try to keep this post as un-technical as possible.  But hey, when your start talking about Google and PageRank I think most people start to tune out.

First off I have more experience with http://www.mls.ca/ so I will be using this as an example, but a brief glance at realtor.com suggests that they likely suffer from the same problem.

So here it goes, from what I have been noticing MLS.ca generally forces all links off of their listings pages to be masked through a redirector page.  For an example, I have chosen a listing by Susan Man that we worked with her on.  In her MLS listing, the links to her own site plus the links to all external websites have been changed to look like

http://www.mls.ca/redirect.aspx?r=http%3a%2f%2fwww.prompton.com&t=org

I believe that the reason for this is so that MLS.ca can keep statistics about what people click on, the problem is that they force Google and other search engines to view pages the same way, which goes against Google’s Website Design Guidelines. MLS.ca should allow Google and other search engines to view all links transparently.  It would help the online presence of the real-estate community as a whole.  It would also allow MLS.ca to easily remove some of the extra hits Google makes from MLS’s already slow servers.  I wouldn’t go so far as to say that doing this would speed up MLS.ca, but it would be a step in the right direction. 

P.S. My assumption that this is not already being done comes from the fact that I was searching through MLS.ca listings pages using googles stored cache, try typing “cache:” and then a website address into google to see what I mean.

I would like to add something more, I am not talking about MLS.ca giving its listing data away to third parties.  I understand the reasoning behind not doing that.   I am only talking about them having a system that allows Google Page Rank to be calculated effectivly for the sites linked to from MLS.ca, this would increase the pagerank of all the realtors on MLS