Many of the listing sites that service the US and Canadian real estate investor don’t accept international properties. And those that do may not rank well for the search terms that are relevant for your property. The classifieds site craigslist, for example, accepts international properties for sale, but let’s say you are promoting a property in Costa Rica, you wont find the site ranking well for searches for ‘Costa Rica real estate.’

So the first step is to determine which sites service your market best. Google is a good place to start. Type in the search phrase your target customer is most likely to use and see which sites appear high in the rankings.

For real estate in Central America, for example, you’ll find the top positions are taken by local brokerage firms and a smattering of property portals. It’s definitely worth contacting local brokerages that are ranking well to see if you can collaborate with them on your property. But remember, in markets with no overarching MLS or listing rules, sellers often don’t list their property exclusively with one firm. The result is that brokerage firms in these markets act more like buyer’s agents than listing agents. So it makes sense to approach more than one firm with your property to get the exposure that you need.

It’s also worth listing your property on international real estate portals. And once you start looking, you’ll find hundreds of sites out there. Some take private sale listings, while others only take listings from real estate agents or brokers. The former mostly reply on manual uploads but there are more and more international listing sites that use scraper bots to automatically draw listings from third party websites.

Some portals only have listings information while others wrap a great deal of editorial content around the listings to help the overseas buyer understand the local market better. Good content (guides, news, video and market analysis) is more likely to keep prospects engaged with the site and boost loyalty and conversion rates. This is especially the case for overseas real estate where buyers are researching a market that is not very familiar to them. Another factor to consider is additional distribution channels (beyond the search engines) that portals may have such as magazines targeting the overseas buyer, publishing agreements with newspapers or exposure via international real estate conventions.

The business model for portals varies considerably. You’ll find free to list portals, paid-for enhanced listings, pay per lead models, commission sharing arrangements and sites with monthly advertising fees. Property Portal Watch does a good job of keeping track of the main sites and its worth checking out their portal overview section.

Once you’ve got a short list, the best thing to do is test the performance of the different sites. Upload the same property description to different sites and compare how many leads you get over a period time. It’s not just about quantity, try to determine how motivated the prospects are. Are they serious about researching property overseas or are they just virtual tire kickers?