Your brokerage's listings exist online from the time they're listed to the time when their status changes to pending. During that period, you're generating brand impressions each and every time someone views a listing online. How is your brand presenting itself?

A substantial part of your brand's impression depends on the accuracy of the listings with which you're associated. This is particularly true in high-demand locales like San Francisco, where days-on-market may be as low as nine. If a potential buyer is relying on, for example, public search portals to find new listings, a significant delay in how quickly those listings are updated may mean that by the time that buyer is notified of a new property, it may already be too late for him or her to take action.

Imagine that buyer's frustration upon calling your office and discovering that the listing is already off the market--and so is the next one they inquire about, and the next. The consumer will feel like they've been lead on or even deceived. This is not the kind of impression your firm wants to make.

This is why it's important to be in control of when and where your listings appear online. Too many brokers are comfortable with simply sending their listings to every available publisher channel in the syndication tool they use without understanding how the publisher handles their data or how frequently they update it.

When it comes to property search portals, Trulia currently leads the pack, checking for updates as frequently as every 8 minutes or up to 180 times a day. (They recently kicked off their 'Get Fresh with Trulia' campaign, focused on the importance of fresh, accurate listings, and they are giving away $5,000 among brokers who sign up for MLS-direct data feeds before December 15, 2014.) Realtor.com accesses RETS servers every 15 minutes, while Zillow updates listings a minimum of every 24 to 48 hours and often more frequently.

When evaluating a syndication partner, you want a channel that's able to update your firm's data quickly. When data is delivered in the fastest possible way, you generate more--and better--brand impressions.

Better brand impressions go hand-in-hand with better leads. If a listing goes expired, sold, or pending and continues to be kicked around online, you generate bad leads. Your agents don't want a lead on listing that's pending or sold. This is no good for your brand and can result in lead fatigue. After repeated bad leads, your agents will stop following-up altogether--and miss real, valuable leads in the process.

Over the next few months, we'll be taking a look at how to evaluate which property search portals to partner with. In our next article, we'll explore how each of the top three portals protects the data and integrity of your brand. Stay tuned!

More Articles in This Series

• 3 Keys to Evaluating How Portals Protect Your Brand
• 3 Ways Portals Help You Hire (and Retain) Top Agents
• 3 Ways Portals Help Brokers Build Brand Awareness