I have seen a couple of different ways to do this. Since the Real Estate industry is generally independent contractors, agents generally have their own sites (even if they are sub-domains of an agency site). For the most part the agents may run one or multiple blogs. Those blogs might have listing information, local information or may be of just general interest. They would be moderated by the agents themselves. The good thing is that the agent generally has complete control of the content. They decide what they write about and they decide how to moderate their blogs.  The guidelines can be looser than if it is not directly on an agency website. One big issue is that it may be easy to “step over the line” with posts or comments, or go to such random subjects that there is no real purpose in the blog. The upside is that there is no one designated as the ‘Blog Policeman’ who must moderate or approve all content.

In a few cases there may be a single Blog that multiple authors have access to (this is how we are set up, although I am having a hard time convincing our other brokers to contribute material at the present time). In this case you would need someone who is ultimately responsible for all the content on the blog. There has to be more control as you are representing a company not just yourself. Content allowed must be spelled out as to acceptability, and generally you would not allow ‘off topic’ discussions. Moderation of comments also becomes an issue, do you allow each author to modulate their discussions or is there a central clearinghouse of comments? The good thing for agency owners is that the traffic generated by the blog stays with the agency even if one of the contributors moves on.

One of my remaining issues is: When is it news and when is it commentary on news? If you notice we do have a separate news page. It is an agency policy to only include news on that particular page. That news is related to real estate or of local interest. The blog is reserved for personal interests and commentary. Since it is a company blog there are topics we have deemed off limits, those are commentary of political or religious nature. There may be other topics we choose to limit in the future but for right now these general guidelines are enough.

In the end, as we move further and further into an all electronic era, people are relying on the internet to give them the information they want. They are not only looking for news but seek to be entertained also, blogging can be either or both. The bottom line is to drive traffic to your website and the old ways of getting yourself near the top of the search engine pages are not as effective, blogging is. That said, with properly written ‘blog policies’ they can be an effective tool for real estate agencies/agents.