Sweet Digs, Sour Grapes and Compost.
May 18th, 2007 Deeper Thoughts, Geekage and Blogging
It’s all over the blogs, but if you missed the news, Redfins real estate porn property review blog Sweet Digs finally gets the hammer blow for “advertising other brokerages listings”.
It was always going to happen. Greg, Kevin and Inman have covered it well enough, so I’ll skip the rehash.
Anyway… here’s my thought on a new potential danger area for agents reviewing homes on their blogs…
Unlike print advertising which turns into landfill within a couple of weeks of printing, your search engine optimized blog post is FOREVER. Simple dating of the blog post may not be regarded as enough of disclaimer for errors that will occur over time. Your blog is not to be confused with an archive at Town Hall, or the records room at a newspaper where by definition everyone understands “I’m looking at very old stuff”.
Blog posts stay indexed in the search engines forever. So what happens when a house sells and your property review stays active on your blog? You may have had permission from the prior owner and agent to show pictures and discuss the house – but what about the new owner? What happens four years from now when the new owner decides to sell and your blog review shows what it looked like before they did $100,000 worth of improvements? (That could be a good or bad thing I guess)
Lets assume that you review someone else’s property and fully express that and link to their website yada yada yada. What happens if the listing expires and a new brokerage gains the listing. Now you’re misleading who is selling the property. Even a disclaimer “correct on xx/xx/2007″ isn’t good enough because a buyer will always call the old brokerage first. (That is assuming they don’t call you of course, but why would they do that? It’s not like you’re advertising or anything is it?)
What if you review your own listing and then it expires and a different agent gets the listing. Now it looks like you’re still selling the house.
As long as people can Google search for homes for sale and have your posts show up, the information needs to be correct. Just because a post was put up on a certain day, doesn’t mean you don’t have editing power to correct it… because you do.
And yes having to edit like that would be a royal pain in the ass.
(My own horror story involved switching brokerages and having to edit 250 pages on my old blog with a fine tooth comb to make my broker of record be explicitly clear and no longer link to what were now competing affiliate services. And yes… THAT TOOK DAYS)
May 18th, 2007 at 4:12 pm
Hadn’t thought of this danger, but you’re absolutely correct. Paper in a landfill isn’t typically viewable, but archived blog articles are.
May 19th, 2007 at 8:25 am
Clearly the best post on the subject. Kudos. This also applies to Zillow’s Q&A content. Even if content is flagged and later removed from the site—it does not get expunged from the cyberspace record.
May 19th, 2007 at 8:47 am
Thanks guys.
I would agree JF that it applies to Zillow flagging etc. If people are constantly annoying a new home owner because an agent flagged their house as for sale, thats an issue. Yes of course the owner can log onto Zillow and claim the house and unflag it, but why the hell should they have to do that? It’s got to be up to the agent to clean their own mess up.
May 19th, 2007 at 10:39 am
[…] Some continuing thoughts from the Sweet Digs fallout discussed on my earlier post Sweet Digs, Sour Grapes and Compost. […]
May 20th, 2007 at 7:46 pm
Definitely a perspective many of us have not considered in respects to this issue. It makes a good case to simply avoid reviewing other agents listings.