The BVAS Connection

You may or may not have heard of Craig’s List, but if you have listings and want a free place to advertise them, you will be using it after reading this. Craig’s List is basically an internet classified site where people list and sell things, homes, post jobs, etc. And best of all… it is FREE to use in most areas. More and more people are going to Craig’s list every day to buy, sell and look for jobs and why not target this internet audience. Real estate professionals have started to wise up to this and it is only a matter of time until it becomes the norm. It is just another online tool where you can showcase your listings to the public and right now it is very friendly to your budget.

Recently I came upon two online tools that can make your Craig’s list ads better than the rest. And they are also free.  The programs I found can spiff up a boring old Craig’s list ad, and customize it to your own… plus automatically syndicate it to all sorts of other listing sites to give your listings more exposure. 

First is Postlets: www.postlets.com. Here you input the property information and a description, you can add up to 12 pictures, and then submit and it makes a nice looking online flyer. It will generate the html code to post on Craig’s list and on your blogs or e-newsletters too. Plus it will automatically send it your ad to Trulia, Oodle and all sorts of others. There seems to be no limit as to how many flyers you can do at once which is a nice feature. The drawback to it is that you it doesn’t look like you can customize the colors or branding of the templates, so what you see is what you get.

Next is vFlyer(www.vflyer.com).  vFlyer is great and does same as above with making a nice looking online flyer plus syndication, but they have more custom templates with other colors that you can choose from and the free version has a few more photos. Here’s an example of one I did for my own house http://megbarberva.vflyer.com/1/index.html (example only, my house is not for sale). Additionally you can email it, print it and track the viewing activity, plus some other goodies. You also can add your flyers to a vFlyer Gallery widget where you can post a gallery of your properties on your blogs, web postings, etc. The drawback with vFlyer is that the free version is limited (only 5 active vFlyers with 15 max photos at a time to name a few) and even the starter version is pretty limited but has a little more capability.  The free version works nicely if you have a small listing inventory, but if you have more than 5 listings at a time you want to advertise, you might want to get the upgrade.

Now you don’t have to have a “fancy” ad posted on Craig’s List to get your listing noticed. Content is king and it is not always about who can have the fanciest html ad on the block. But using something like Postlets or vFlyer can help set you apart from the rest, and even impress your sellers and prospective clients.