(Note: PropertyTown was acquired by NationalRelocation.com since the original writing of these questions)

Q: Some of our Readers may not be familiar with PropertyTown…please give us an overview of Property town and the motivation to create the product:

I spent the majority of ’06 doing consulting work for a large real estate web hosting provider. I left that project somewhat intrigued by the overall poor quality of both products and services being marketed to real estate agents. Not only was the space flooded with low quality, cookie-cutter solutions, there were (and still are) a lot of people giving agents bad advice about their search marketing strategies.

Towards the end of our consulting gig we started talking with the parent company of our client about possibly coming on board with them to help develop a new, 2.0 type platform for them to market. But after a couple meetings, it became pretty clear that the company in question was far to bloated to have even the slightest chance of producing anything of quality within my lifetime. So we had a team meeting and decided we’d build something ourselves.

Q: Why did you choose WordPress as your platform?

Speed of development primarily, but also because of our level of experience with WordPress. We’ve worked on projects using other open source solutions like Drupal and Joomla, but we’ve been hacking on WordPress for a very long time, so it just made sense for us to go with what we knew best.

Q: Knowing that WordPress does have some challenges in regards to SEO, how do you handle that?

Most of the true SEO challenges were handled long before we thought of PropertyTown. We have a pretty extensive suite of custom plugins that we use on client projects. The real challenge with PropertyTown was dealing with the fact that WordPress off the shelf is a pretty poor CMS for standard, static types of sites.

Our goal from the very beginning was to try and close the huge divide between the typical static sales site, and your average real estate blog. To do that meant we had to do quite a bit of work on building tools that allowed an agent to create and manage pages just as easily as posts. With the current system you have complete control when it comes to create navigation structures, and everything is point-and-click.

Q: I understand you have some internal forums, can you give us some details as to how they are being utilized?

Unlike most of the other hosting companies, we don’t offer any direct SEO services to our agents. For us, SEO isn’t something that can be done properly for the kind of prices agents are used to paying. When you try and build a model on low margins and high volume, you ultimately end up having to cut some corners to make a profit. And cutting those corners often involves doing things that Google doesn’t care for.

We never wanted to become one of those services that screws up and gets all their clients banned because we were pushing the envelop to make a buck, so we decided a better approached would be tooffer more of a “teach you to fish” program. The forum is where that happens. We spend time helping them learn things like the ins-and-outs of social media, doing competitive research, long-term link building, analytics and conversion tracking, etc.. It works out well because the noise level is very low, and the people answering questions have a lot of experience.

Q: Can you share some site examples?

Here is couple that we recently launched:

http://www.scottsdalehomes.com/
http://www.kristalsellsdenver.com/

We’re pretty excited about having Kristal on board. She is prominent blogger who really gets the 2.0 thing. And she also has done a great job building a site that also incorporates a lot of non-blog content.

Q: What do you see happening with the future of IDX integrations?

I’m hoping you’ll start seeing agents looking at integrated IDX less as an SEO tool and more of stickiness tool. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard an agent say they want an integrated IDX so that they can get thousands and thousand of pages indexed. The problem with that is the days of that kind of content having any real SEO value are coming to an end. Google now has so much user behavior data at their disposal that having a non-indexed IDX solution that keeps users on your site longer will actually have a bigger impact on your rankings than all the crawled content.

Q: The national MLS has been a hot topic in the RE.net recently — where does property town weigh in on this debate?

From a purely service provider standpoint, I think it would be great. In the big picture, we’re not interested in collecting and storing data ourselves. (Which is the main reason we did the deal with National Relocation) Instead, we want to build a web services model that allows individual agents and brokers to easily interact with multiple data sources. Having a central repository for MLS data would certainly make that process much easier.

Thanks or your time Greg!

I moved to Seattle a little over a year ago. One of the first major decisions I had to make before relocating was “where do I want to live”? As I was researching that question, I found myself opening browser windows side-by-side in order to compare data about cities and neighborhoods in the markets I was looking at. I wanted to know neighborhood and city home value trends, age distribution, crime stats, test scores of local schools, the local weather, distribution of types of homes, what stores are located nearby, local events, etc.

I eventually settled in Auburn, WA, but never did find a decent solution to quickly compare neighborhoods — instead, I spent numerous precious hours (that I’d like to spend doing something else) scouring over websites such as Zillow (my employer), Trulia, John L Scott and Windermere.

Obviously, I am not the only relocating home buyer who needs to answer the question of “where do I want to live”. That said, I’d venture to say looking at browser windows separately seems like a less than ideal technical solution. So, why don’t more real estate sites allow people to compare neighborhoods or cities side-by-side? Are there any good sites out there that I’m missing? It just seems like it would be a very useful tool for many buyers in the relocation process, and I imagine it would be fairly simple to build with existing data available (either via the Zillow API or other sources).

The best comparison tool I found was the one on Apartments.com, but I think there is a lot of room to improve. For instance, two additions I can think of are giving the user the option to compare cities in different states and allowing comparisons of neighborhoods rather than just cities.

Most of these sites live in the real estate world, but as you notice I mention a few of the more popular social sites.

Profiles that allow links and do follow. (Followed links are reviewed by search engine crawlers and the link is taken into consideration when ranking your website)

• Linkedin.com
• Realestatewebmasters.com
• ActiveRain.com
• Zillow.com (my employer)
• Propertyqube.com
• Realtown.com
• Homehugg.com
• Squidoo.com

Profiles that offer no follow. (No follow links are links but are not crawled by search engine bots and not counted towards your sites ranking)

• Myspace.com
• Facebook.com
• Yahoo answers
• Stumbleupon.com
• Reddit.com
• Del.icio.us
• Trulia.com

Placing your links on sites that do not offer followed links is still a good idea, just don’t expect credit for the link. These sites are better as a means of actual traffic.

Simply having a website is not enough. It’s important to use social networking sites in order to increase your findability and leverage some high quality links back to your website.

This list is by no means complete, so feel free to mention other sources of free followed links.