This past weekend I went seeking out web sites that were using RSS feeds to display results for real estate listings. I was surprised by the absence of heavy use of RSS in industries such as the real estate industry. I will be checking out some other niche markets to see if RSS technology is as scarce in those as well.

Was searching for RSS and real estate. One WordPress blog based real estate site RSS Realtor had a nice WordPress theme, but not much content. I was even surprised by the lack of advertising appearing when performing Google searches using combined keywords of real estate and RSS. Among top results for natural searches were the usual expected big media web sites such as the New York Times, The Real Estate Journal (owned by the Wall Street Journal), and the Washington Post.

I would’ve surely expected to see someone aggregating either residential listings or commercial listings into RSS feeds that could be displayed all from one web site. I checked out some major web sites like Yahoo’s real estate pages and MSN’s real estate pages, but no options to subscribe to any RSS feeds.

It doesn’t seem like a big jump to me to convert listings related to real estate into RSS feeds. RSS is working spectacularly well in niche areas that are utilizing feed technology for classified ads. A niche market example is chiropractic classifieds (offers free classifieds for the entire profession) and a broad example is Craigslist.org (classifieds for nearly every city in the United States, and other metro areas throughout the world).

Appears to me that there’s an early adopter advantage in the real estate space.