The whole point of having a real estate website is getting website visitors signing up for your mailing list.  To get that your site needs lots of current information on your farm neighborhoods.  When people see your site has lots of useful information for helping them buy a home in a neighborhood they’re looking at, and they see you update this information regularly, they’re apt to sign up for your mailing list so they can get this information regularly.  This information will also help your website’s ranking in search engines like Google.

However, many, many real estate professionals’ sites neither have much useful information on their farm areas, nor is it current.  Even if they did have this information, they often don’t have the required technical knowledge.  Frankly, many real estate professionals don’t see the value in regularly updating their website.

The website Outside.in solves these problems.  This site aggregates blog articles from neighborhood specific blogs from more than 3,000 neighborhoods in 55 cities across the US (hopefully Canada is coming soon). These articles are written by local residents and may deal with anything to do with a neighborhood such as real estate, reviews of new local amenities, community events, rants, local politics – in short, things that would potentially interest anyone wanting to learn more about these neighborhoods.

The great thing about Outside.in is they provide an RSS type feed for whichever neighborhoods you choose.  An RSS feed is a news service like Reuters or the Associated Press that’s provided online and offers regular article updates on particular topics.  As these articles are published by the RSS feed, all subscribers to that feed will have this information automatically sent to them, either via email or placed directly on their own website.  So you no longer have to even lift a finger to get useful content on your farm neighborhoods automatically published to your website!

I did a search on San Francisco to see what’s available.  Nearly 100 neighborhoods for San Fran were listed.  In the Haight Ashbury neighborhood there were articles published pretty much every day (although several days would go by without anything) on a very wide range of local matters.

It seems to me this is an excellent resource, but if you’re going to setup a feed to your website, you should probably keep an eye on the content.  Much like American Idol, since the advent of blogs lots of people have come along who think they can write when they have no business doing so.  So some of their topics may not be worth writing about either.  There’s no point in having a steady stream of articles on your website if they aren’t very interesting or informative.  So be prepared to moderate the article flow occasionally.