Florida, Arizona and Nevada were once again top traffic destinations for international buyers.  Florida attracted 31.04% of all international traffic to the U.S, while Arizona increased it’s share from 15.15% in Q3 to 19.44%.  Nevada maintained its 3rd place spot with an 8.61% share of traffic.

Canadian traffic was once again the highest source for online visits, with 93.58% going to Arizona, 78.28% to Hawaii and 74.11% to Michigan.

Las Vegas retained it’s top spot on the report’s overall ‘top 20′ cities searched, with a share of 14.53% of all search traffic, and holding on to 90% of all the international traffic recorded for the state of Nevada.

But that’s not all!  To read the FULL report, make sure to download it here.

As a wise man once told me, there are no buyer’s agents, just agents without listings.

Listings are the most valuable asset a real estate brokerage or agent has. But generating new listings, while not exactly a complex science, requires that a home seller develops the confidence that you have what it takes to sell their property at the best price and in the shortest time possible. That’s not necessarily an easy accomplishment, especially if you are new to real estate or do not typically carry many listings of your own.

One of the most important opportunities to influence a home seller to list with you is the listing presentation. A listing presentation is an event that no agent should contemplate without careful and thorough preparation. Irrespective, and all else being equal, if the main takeaway the seller learns is that you have the knowledge, experience and ability to give their property optimal exposure to more buyers, you’ve just wildly increased your chances of success.

Given that the Web has become the consumer’s playground for real estate research, your marketing plan will need to incorporate and demonstrate powerful strategies you will implement to publicize your prospect’s property online. Particularly on websites known to attract online real estate buyers.

In a few short years, Listing Syndication has virtually become a de facto component of powerful property marketing online, and a key differentiator in any successful agent’s listing presentation kit. When deployed through a solid platform, listing information entered once in the MLS can be accessed by the listing agent and re-distributed to dozens of popular websites of their choice, within their syndication service provider’s network.

When discussing how you plan to market your prospect’s home, Listing Syndication can be one of your most important competitive advantages. Reinforce your pitch with statistics that show that over 90% of consumers today use the Web in one way or another in their home buying process. As well, share with your potential client data that shows that online buyers are highly fragmented. Hitwise.com clearly highlights that the top 10 real estate sites garner only 40% of all the targeted traffic out there, and that the top three sites don’t even account for 20% of that traffic.

Being on all the top ten sites suddenly becomes critical, but hardly sufficient as that too leaves out more than half of the market.

This is where the Syndication discussion comes in. Explain how your Syndication strategy can optimize exposure of the client’s property by advertising it on several dozen real estate websites. Produce handouts and diagrams to help your prospect visualize how syndication increases exposure on many sites, and show them print outs of online traffic reporting and monitoring charts. Discuss tools you can place in their hands for them to be able to dynamically check on traffic flow and views of their property listing, at their convenience.

More exposure to more buyers online means a higher chance of a sale, faster. Deeply integrating a solid web exposure strategy into your listing presentations, leveraging Listing Syndication, is easy to achieve, easy to explain and sets you apart. It can also easily be that extra clincher you need to close new listings.

Along with this explosion of activity has come a desire for insight into the question of  just where are international buyers coming from? To answer this question we dug deep into the data from Point2Homes.com and came up with some interesting results in regards to where international traffic is coming from, and where it is headed.

Florida properties emerged as the lead attraction for foreigners online, followed by Arizona and Nevada real estate listings. Florida real estate listings captured 33.03 percent of the international traffic recorded to all U.S. states during the quarter. Arizona attracted 15.15 percent and Nevada 8.22 percent.

Canadian traffic made up 91.89 percent of the overall international traffic to Arizona listings, 75.90 percent to Hawaii, 73.92 percent to Michigan, 70.55 percent to Nevada and 65.05 percent to California. Puerto Rico, also covered in the report, ranked tenth on the list, with 16.82 percent of the traffic.

Las Vegas ranked first (14.53%) on the report’s overall ‘top 20’ cities in the nation category for online properties searched by international visitors. The top 20 list includes eight cities in Florida, four in California and three in Arizona. Las Vegas real estate listings attracted 91.73 percent of all the international traffic recorded for the state of Nevada during the third quarter, with Canada as the leading source at 70.47 percent. The UK followed at 5.28 percent and France at 2.19 percent.

Want the FULL report with all the juicy data? Feel free to download it right here.

To help sort out the issues, controversies, benefits, and fears surrounding Listing Syndication check out at this Slidecast presentation that was put together by Point2′s own Saul Klein and Linda Moola, which outlines the features and benefits of Listing Syndication to real estate professionals on all levels – from MLS/Associations, to Brokers and individual Agents.

If you have any questions, comments, or feedback we’d love to hear from you!

While attitude has a lot to do with success, there are many tangible ideas and tools virtually anyone can take advantage of. As you will quickly realize, hardly any of those ‘revealed’ in this article are secrets or mysteries. The real secret lies in the ability to take action and apply the ideas, rather than in the knowledge itself. Here are three ideas.

Top Agents Are Easily Found on the Web – With a third of all home buyers starting their search online, and a whopping 90 percent using the Internet in the buying process, the winning agents are those found more easily where buyers lurk. There are consumer real estate portals, search engines, auction sites and classified ad sites. The Point2 listing syndication service available for free through nearly 250 MLSs and associations in the United States is a great way to achieve high exposure with virtually no effort.

Another way to be found is through Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Today you can automate SEO, with the new Site Builder website product by Point2, launched this past June. Just select the city you operate in and a website with great initial SEO is generated for you, meta tags and all!

They Take Time to Add Rich Content to their Websites – This mystery does not pertain to a technology tool, but a discipline. One agent we know of and that we wrote about in a separate story gets 80 percent of his business from his website! That is a number worth paying attention to. He does it by engaging visitors with rich content.

“If I had to pick one aspect that works… well, actually there are several. I believe the ability to display a large number of photographs, room for plenty of information and the creation of a virtual tour environment is very much appreciated by my clients and potential clients. These three features not only serve to market the property well but also reflect on the client’s perception of my professionalism.”

They are Good at Converting Leads into Revenue – You might be surprised at how many leads are left to rot in agent inboxes. As the majority of prospects will go with the first agent who responds to them, having the right tools in place to help you be first out of the gate is key. Check if your website incorporates a lead management system that captures inquiries coming in from your listing syndication efforts and if it routes leads to your cell phone. This is extremely important to beat the 30 minute patience guideline of online prospects. This strategy is a winner!

Perhaps one of the greatest myths out there is that knowledge is power. It is not. Knowledge without action is nearly useless. Power, as Tony Robbins, one of my favorite life and motivational coaches says, is the ability to take consistent action towards a specific goal. That’s when luck also seems to kick in!

After eight years with the same real estate website provider, another real estate agent recently decided it was time to move on. He switched to Point2 Agent just two weeks ago.

The reason? Fully integrated listing syndication, which was brought to this agent’s attention by his MLS – one of the over 240 that have partnered with Point2.

But there’s more to syndication than meets the eye.

Syndication as a trend took off around three years ago. Adoption continues to accelerate today, with one of the key drivers being that automating the publishing of listing data eliminates manual data entry and updates on third party websites, both very time consuming, error prone processes that can legally expose the agent and the broker, and unnecessarily tax productivity.

Data accuracy online and agent security are therefore two critical benefits that syndication helps the broker, the agent and their MLS (Multiple Listing Service) to manage more effectively.

Inaccurate or conflicting listings with two different prices, on two different websites, for example, can also create confusion amongst consumers.

Last but not least is wider exposure to more buyers online. Around one third of home buyers start their property search on the Internet, and over 90 percent today use the web as part of the overall property process! With the number of consumer real estate portals on the increase, syndication using an integrated website platform allows the agent to expand their advertising, access online traffic reports and generate leads without having to as much as lift a finger.

And if the syndication service is offered through the agent’s MLS, such as the case with the customer we mentioned earlier, listings also get uploaded on his own website as well, further cutting down the work needed to establish and maintain his website.

The MLS as such becomes the single point of data entry. Enter the data once, publish many times.