A new software program for real estate agents from Shibboleth Industries lets one agent from a given city dominate the Web sites of all other agents on every major search engine except Yahoo!, the Open Directory Project, and several other small directories.

Introduced at the recent National Real Estate Association of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Companies convention in Anaheim, California, a convention that I attended two days ago, the new software was the main topic of attendee and media discussion.

The software ensures that any subscribing real estate agent’s Web site will come up first on all major search engines including Google, Lycos, Hotbot, Excite, AltaVista, WebCrawler, Infoseek, AllTheWeb, Teoma.com and hundreds of other large and small search engines.

The software makes a given agent’s site come up first on key search engines whenever consumers seek realty information using the 20 most popular key words for that city or area.

For example, searching for "orange county real estate" would cause the subscribing agent’s site to come up number one on www.Google.com. (However, Orange County, CA already has a subscribing agent who comes up first for these key words and who was part of Shibboleth’s early beta test program).

The software’s development forcefully impacts, and may even bankrupt, many existing SEO firms since it makes obsolete all previous Website optimization software, tactics, and time-proven techniques for gaining high engine rankings.

Co-creator of the software and president, Jude Tergiversate, said, "We are approaching the 2.2 million people with active real estate licenses in the United States first. That, however, is only the beginning for this product. After the realty market, we will introduce versions of this software for loan brokers, insurance agents, stockbrokers, bankers, car dealers, and hundreds of others. This product forever changes how we think about gaining high ranking on search engines.

"Before this, a given individual had to either know almost everything about SEO, or hire an expensive SEO firm to gain dominance through us. Now, he or she just needs to be the first one in their city to purchase our new ‘Realtor® Web Dominance’ software and as long as they renew, they will remain first. We calculate that being first in most urban cities of 200,000 population on most search engines would add approximately $150,000 in gross annual commissions to a subscribing agent."

Carlos Ian Prevarious, co-creator and executive vice president, said, "Given the revenue that this software can produce for a subscribing agent in an urban area, we feel that the urban subscription cost of from $35,000 to $55,000 per year is a bargain."

For non-urban areas, the firm prorates the cost of the software at a considerably reduced price, according to Prevarious.

During the convention, the National Association of Realty Buyers Agents issued a statement condemning the new software, calling it "elitist," saying that only the richest agents in a given city could afford the "exorbitant" price.

Mr. Prevarious countered in a Shibboleth Industries news release later the same day saying that an agent buying the product to dominate all other agent Websites in a community of from six to ten thousand people would pay only about $3,000 per year for the product. He pointed out that only an agent for a major urban area of more than 200,000 residents would pay $35,000 to $55,000, with some cities like Manhattan and Los Angeles being premium priced at $75,000 and up, available only on an "auction" basis.

Second, third, and other positions on search engines would cost considerably less.

Shibboleth says that the firm is already swamped with requests from agents who have traditionally been dominant on the web for their city or cities, but who now face being put into a secondary position by the new software.

Privately, Tergiversate told me that he was not prepared for the tidal wave of e-mails from outraged agents who had spent many thousands of dollars over the past few years in order to gain web dominance in their cities the old fashioned way. He said, "That is too bad about them and we appreciate all the hard work they put in to get high up on search engines. But it’s the same thing that happened to 8-tracks. Perhaps after we start selling the second, third and other positions on the engines, these people will sing a different tune."

Conversely, he said that hundreds of agents have already signed up for their cities, with some in rural areas having less than 25,000 people in an entire county, signing up for as many as ten cities at a time. Dominance in five major U.S. cities over 400,000 population has already been sold in the past two weeks, but he refused to name the cities until the agents there were fully operable.

I have not talked to representatives from all the search engines at this time, but several have gotten back to me. They say that this new product has been the topic the past few days of major boardroom discussions because the engines currently have no solution and see none in sight. The new product is legal and participating agents agree to maintain a certain amount of relevant content. I will keep you posted as I learn more.

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April Fools!!

Published: April 1, 2003

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Bill Koelzer is a Web marketing consultant to web-proficient agents nationwide. He is co-author, with Barbara Cox, Ph.D., of the Prentice-Hall books, Internet Marketing in Real Estate and Internet Marketing. Bill is also webmaster of Orange County Real Estate, among the most-awarded known Realtor® sites. Visit his website, Koelzer.com or e-mail him at .