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Listing AutomatEr and the alternatives

If you want the listings you are permitted to market in front of people browsing homes on Facebook Marketplace, you have four real options: do it by hand, do not do it, pay a person to do it, or run software. This page describes all four honestly, including where the software is the wrong answer.

Listing AutomatEr, for the comparison below, is a desktop app for Mac and Windows that posts the listings you have permission to market to Facebook Marketplace on a schedule and writes the attribution and the disclosure on every post. We do not name competing products here. Naming somebody in order to knock them is a sales trick, and half the tools in this space change what they do between the time a page like this is written and the time you read it. What follows is a set of questions you can carry to any option, ours included.

Option one, doing it by hand

You open the form, type the details, upload the photos, write the copy, type the attribution and the disclosure, and publish. Then you do it again for the next home, and again in a few days when the first one has sunk out of sight.

It is free and it works. Two things go wrong with it over time. The first is that it is the task that gets dropped on a busy week, which is exactly the week it would have mattered. The second is that the attribution and the disclosure are typed by a tired person, so they drift, and drift is the part that carries actual risk in a regulated advertising context.

If you are marketing a small number of homes and you are disciplined, doing it by hand is a perfectly good answer and you do not need us.

Option two, not doing it

Plenty of good agents do not touch this at all and build their business through their own network, through farming, or through referrals. That is a legitimate answer and it costs nothing. It is worth naming as an option rather than pretending everyone must be posting.

The reason people revisit it is that it leaves you with the channels you already have, and if those channels are thin, thin is what the year looks like.

Option three, paying a person to do it

An assistant or a contractor can do the posting. This works and some teams run it this way. What you are buying is somebody else's time and attention, which means the cost recurs monthly, the quality moves when the person moves, and the permission question and the disclosure wording are now being handled by somebody who is not the licensee whose name is on the post.

If you go this way, put the disclosure wording in writing and check the posts. The license is yours, and so is what the post says.

Option four, software, and the categories inside it

Software in this area falls into a few groups, described here by what they do rather than by who makes them.

• Browser extensions that fill the form. They type for you while you sit at the computer. Fast, cheap, and by design they need you present for each post.
• General social schedulers. They queue posts to social profiles. A social profile post and a classifieds listing are different surfaces, and a general scheduler has no reason to know what a listing brokerage is.
• Bulk posting tools built for car dealers. They take an inventory feed and push it out at volume. The shape of the job is similar and the compliance surface is not, because a car does not have a listing brokerage that must be credited.
• Desktop apps built for real estate listings. This is where Listing AutomatEr sits.

What Listing AutomatEr does

Listing AutomatEr is a desktop app for Mac and Windows. Here is what it does, stated plainly so you can hold any alternative up against it.

• It works from the listings you have permission to market, and it says so everywhere rather than implying you may post anything.
• It writes three lines on every post: your name as the person marketing the home, the brokerage that holds the listing credited as the listing brokerage, and the disclosure that you are marketing on that brokerage's behalf.
• It takes your brokerage's required disclosure once and appends it to every post, so the wording does not depend on what you remembered to type.
• It posts those listings on a schedule and reposts them, at a human pace with randomized delays and a daily cap.
• It runs from your own computer and your own browser session, on Mac or Windows, rather than from a server posting on your behalf.
• Style Lab drafts the listing copy in the voice you set, and you edit it before anything goes out.
• The listing records it draws from cover the country.

What it does not do is the more useful half of the list. It does not get permission, it does not judge whether you have permission, it does not guarantee a post is compliant, it does not post to portals or lead platforms, and it does not promise you a conversation or a closing.

The questions to carry to any of these

Take these to us and to anything else you are looking at. They are the ones that separate the options once the marketing copy is stripped off.

• Does it write the brokerage attribution and the disclosure on every post, or is that still your typing?
• Can you enter your brokerage's exact required wording once?
• Does it run from your own account and your own browser, or from somebody's server?
• Does it post at a human pace with a cap, and can you see the cap?
• Does it ever suggest you can post a home you do not have permission to market?
• Does it claim your posts are compliant? If so, ask what it is standing behind, because that question sits between you, your brokerage and your state.
• Does it quote leads, income, or a return? Ask where the number came from.
• What does it cost, and where is the price written down?

Who should not buy this

• Anyone whose brokerage does not allow marketing outside its own channels. That is the end of it, and no tool changes it.
• Anyone who wants to post homes they do not have permission to market.
• Anyone who wants a post sent to portals or lead platforms. This posts to Facebook Marketplace and nowhere else.
• Anyone who wants the permission handled for them, or a promise that a post is compliant.
• Anyone marketing so few homes that doing it by hand is genuinely fine. It probably is.
• Anyone not comfortable with the account risk of posting at volume on a platform they do not control. That risk is real and the FAQ says so plainly.

What it costs

Listing AutomatEr is the desktop app that posts the listings you have permission to market to Facebook Marketplace, and it is the same price wherever you work. See pricing for the current figures. New subscriptions begin with a free trial and you can cancel anytime. Charges are final and refunds are not offered. The comparison worth making is not against another product's price, it is against what the hour a week is worth to you and what a drifting disclosure would cost you once.