RSS

From Real Estate

Using RSS feeds you can customize your site with targeted, dynamic content, the goal of which is of course to attract more traffic to your site. In short, people publish content in RSS format, whether BLOGS, News headlines, or whatever. Theoretically, the content available on any given feed changes regularly. You can include these feeds on your site by using an aggregator. As a fan of the Python programming language, I came across a very nice utility that functions as an aggregator, known as the Universal Feed Parser, written in Python. An early test proved that it was fairly easy to connect to an RSS Feed and incorporate a series of Real Estate related headlines on a test web site. More work is needed - when I have something worthwhile to show, I'll post a link. In the mean time, the feed I experimented with is Real Estate and How. Note - if you just follow this link the results may look funny - as I stated, these feeds are meant to be collected with an aggregator or news reader, but most browsers will render them to some extent. Also - this feed really seems geared to brokers, agents, and investors - not end customers. When I have a better handle on the technology I'll be looking for more consumer-oriented feeds for our RE site. Know any nice ones, anybody?

[edit] 2005/12/22 update

I've discovered a Real Estate related PodCast (http://www.realestateinsiders.com/media/rss/insider-update.xml) - it's a special purpose rss feed which contains links to audio information. It's put out by the Real Estate Insiders, and contains periodic podcasts concerning Real Estate and mortgage information. I've started playing with it using the feedparser as mentioned above on my beta site. The formatting is still under development, but you can preview the Real Estate Podcast. Look in the right-most column, under the HUD link.

[edit] 2006/01/11

I've moved the Real Estate PodCast to our live site.