Hey all, been working with the team on finalizing the first version of the new Condo MLS.
Here’s some insight / updates into what it takes to make this thing awesome:
#1: Unique photos (you have to use unique photos, you can’t take them from the web) - It takes about 30 minutes a building if you drive into a dense area with lots of buildings (walking and shooting time) using your phone is fine if you have a good one, but take the time to get really good shots.
Here’s a quick and easy phone photo for example:
So if you had 100 buildings to cover? That’s 3,000 minutes (50 hours). I’m going to recommend you hire this out. Pay someone $25 an hour (or whatever your local rate is for someone reliable who wants to earn some extra case and has a good phone for pics. Cost $1,250 (maybe up to $2,500)
Pro tip - this is great exercise (and a great way to remind yourself of the buildings and their features) < and it’s fun, Calry and I did it. So you might want to consider doing the photo part yourself and get your steps in 
#2: Building research: I have our new concierge doing this. She’s looking at public records, MLS listings, and many other places for research. She’s ticking through pretty well, and so I’d say it’s about 30 mins to an hour for each building to really get good data. So again $1,250-$2,500 for the research (these are the stats bit)
#3: Content: You “could” use ChatGPT, but I’m not convinced that Google is loving AI content as much as truly unique content. Instead what I’m going to recommend is that you use a talk-to-text feature such as Google docs Type with your voice. It’s the best way to ensure you’re unique, it’s in your tone, and is well informed. You can then have an assistant take those writeups to Grammarly to fix whatever needs to be fixed, and then use AI for the formatting part (but don’t have it be rewritten) - something like "Can you put this text into web friendly HTML with formatting) as a prompt.
That’s about 30 minutes all in per building as well.
And then you’ve got the final part
#4: Data entry - once you have everything it’s about 10 mins to fill it all out, upload the photos (make sure they are webP) so another 1,000 minutes for 100 buildings?
So what is that, about 10,000 minutes (170 ish hours) to have the most robust local building MLS in your area with 100 buildings full of high-value content? About $5k in costs if you find someone affordable and reliable locally.
50% of 1 deal over 2 years. Worth it? HELL YEAH!
We’re filling ours out right now!
Last thing on cost: “Right now” we’re not charging for this feature (though it’s pretty badass) so for early adopters/testers, the only cost at REW is the hours it takes to hack the beta into your system (maybe 3-4 hours? Something like that?
So who thinks their site would be much more attractive to consumers if they were the ONLY website that had high quality MLS style information on “buildings” instead of units?
Do you think customers would come to your site when they are thinking of buying a condo?
Imagine the SEO and PPC potential!
Cities like Chicago, Miami, Los Angeles would go nuts for this. But it works for small towns like Nanaimo as well