Page Rank is not as important as it once was, and there are many other factors that pass through a link including trust and (as “Riverside” mentioned) anchor text.

Also, syndicating your listings does not always require a link back to your site and even a mention of your name. I know the MLS company for Kauai and the Big Island of Hawaii don’t require any reference to who the listing agent is while Oahu and Maui require mention of the listing broker’s name.

I agree with Hawaii real estate guy “Google will actually follow the link but will not pass juice (PR). They will index a page that has a link to it with a no-follow.”
I have been working in the RE sphere for the past couple of years, and quite often I get links that are “no-followed”, but I actually don’t mind. The reason for this is because I have my own personal examples of no-follow links being “attributed”
to my site (Meaning that when I log into Google Webmaster tools, go to the link section it actually counts no-followed links in that number). I do agree that it will not pass the page rank value of the page, but you forgot a KEY element!

ANCHOR TEXT!
You’re link may be no followed, but if your anchor text on your link is relevant to your keyword, that is picked up by Google. While Google may not pass page rank, it will understand the content of the page, the context of the link and the anchor text used.

I am looking in the Source Section and I do not see where the no follow tag is? Please advise. I want to learn to spot this.

I do think it is unfair to the agents and companies if sites like Realtor.com and Trulia are not linking to them unless it has a condom on it. They are using their content and then telling Google they do not trust this site. What’s up with that?

Got it, thanks. When I say “followed” I am definitely referring to whether google indexes the linked page. While trying to optimize a site’s SEO, getting indexed and gaining authority is all that matters when determining whether a listing partner’s site is SEO-friend or SEO-foe.

I had not heard that they may not index the page or rank it yet still go on to find (and follow) links there. Interesting if it’s true but even according to that wiki article, that theory is contra google’s official statement on this. As you probably know, there’s a fair amount of mistique and voodoo (and BS) in SEO. From what I’ve seen, however, nofollow is such a scarily effective strategy for outranking an original data source but I’d bet that simple internal linking on the target sites would probably have made that impossible if the theory were true. Maybe the folks at google will pop in here and let us know one way or the other …

That makes sense to trust the links if they are verified real estate agents, but how can that be verified? And how do you know that ads coming from something like Postlets.com don’t contain spam?