Immobel.com announced at the Inman Real Estate Connect conference that it has made an alliance with Houston Association of Realtors (HAR), as well as Triangle Realtors Association of Raleigh, NC to display their MLS listings data on the immobel.com Global Real Estate Portal.
These Boards follow the Realtors Association of Miami and the Beaches (RAMB) in seeing the benefits for their membership in displaying listings data in additional languages.
Since it's launch in June 2000, immobel.com has expanded into 8 countries, including the United States, South Africa and Spain. All listings on the portal can be seen in the viewer's choice of any of 10 languages -- English, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, German, Polish, Russian, Chinese, and Japanese, with more to be added. They do not use machine translation nor do they charge Boards of Realtors or MLS organizations for their services.
"HAR was one of the few boards to already have their data in an additional language," noted immobel.com president/CEO Janet Choynowski. "So when we offered a further eight languages, they knew from experience just how valuable that could be in generating business for their members."
Immobel.com also announced that it would open a new multi-language portal dedicated to Global Commercial Property, facilitating the marketing of commercial and investment properties to investors and end users. With so many corporate expansions across borders, it is often necessary for several offices around the world to sign off on a given acquisition or investment. This makes the information equally available to all concerned parties, in the language of their choice, yet the listings data need only be handled once.
"In my years as head of country in Poland for CB Richard Ellis, this was an ongoing challenge, and one that had to be dealt with on an individual basis," said Janet Choynowski. "These new products evolved out of that experience, and meet the real needs of property professionals in their day to day business, with almost no additional effort."
The Commercial portal will also offer a full range of company, broker and agent web sites, in the multi language format, specifically designed for the commercial property professional Interested in International transactions.
Listings data can be uploaded to the portal from any of the 10 languages, providing a truly global market place for real estate of all kinds. Prices may be displayed in any one of 20 currencies, and sizes are converted to/ from metric automatically.
With recent US Census statistics showing that immigrant populations will be the most important factor in the first- time buyers market, and international buyers investing more than 100 million dollars per year in US real estate, the need to market listings in more than just English language has become crucial.
Pat Rioux
