Imagine this, you find your listing displayed on a popular website in France--the only problem is that the listing sold five years ago! You are outraged, so you decide to call the website, a French publisher (a six-hour time zone difference away) trying to make a case that the website must remove the listing because it is no longer on the market. Now, imagine this conversation taking place in French...

Operator: "Parlez-vous français?"
You: "No...English please."
Operator: "Je ne parle pas anglais."
You: "...huh?"

Well, you get the picture. It sounds daunting, to say the least!

Marketing to international buyers comes with certain challenges. In other countries listings are considered "open listings" and nobody has the exclusive right – or responsibility – to market a property accurately and effectively. Currently, companies who syndicate listings to international publishers today are doing so without the level of protections we have become accustomed to here in the United States.

Accuracy is a pervasive problem in international advertising, one that we explored in detail with our 2013 study on international advertising. We conducted research in which we evaluated listing data accuracy on two major publishers in the UK that display U.S. listings.

Our research team randomly selected 200 listings from two UK websites and checked each one for accuracy by comparing the listing information on the UK site to the listing information on realtor.com®. We chose sites in the UK for one simple reason: they are in English, and thus, easier for us to evaluate without translation. We checked five core fields for each listing: status, price, address, beds, and baths. If all five factors were correct for the listing, it was deemed "accurate." Here is what we found:

• 63% of listings on the first website we checked were incorrect on at least one core field.
• 86% of the listings on the second website we checked were incorrect on at least one core field.
• Overall: 75% of the listings we checked were inaccurate, only 25% accuracy observed on international publishers.
• 32% of all the listings we checked (nearly half of the total inaccurate listings) were not even on the market, with "last sold" dates as long ago as 2007, 2005 and 1992!

So what is a broker to do? How can you get your piece of the international pie while maintaining the integrity of your listing data? With ListHub Global, a new service from ListHub, brokers can market their listings to a network of over 20 international publishers, with the same data protections and managed listing distribution platform available through ListHub today. Another benefit to using ListHub Global is that brokers will have a single source for support, so no need to learn French or make expensive long distance calls to get help from international publishers!

The first ListHub Global partner is the EdenHome network, which includes a network of websites in 19 countries, primarily across Europe. Check out the infographic below for some "Quick Facts" on ListHub Global and the EdenHome network. 

Next Steps

• Visit the ListHub educational calendar to join an upcoming webinar to learn more about ListHub Global.
• To read the complete ListHub study on international advertising, read the whitepaper on RE Technology.