Create your own Real Estate Email Newsletter

There are a couple of popular email news letters that focus on commercial real estate news. Here in Canada I am thinking of Maurice Gatien's weekly email and the RENX news letter.

What if you could publish your own newsletter? What if you could select news items from a variety of real estate news sources and easily combine them into your personalized news source? And what if you could deliver this not only as an email but as and RSS feed, as a component or on a web page?

It's easy to do! The technology is online and the effort of 'publish' is less than what you spend on reading the paper each morning.

Here's a step by step process of how to build your personal news source:

1. Sign up for Google reader at http://www.google.com/reader
   
2. Next add some real estate related feeds. To get you started, here are a few that I use:
   
   • http://www.globest.com/canada.xml
     
   • http://www.globest.com/northeast.xml
     
   • http://www.costar.com/News/RSS/RSS.aspx?ext=.xml
     
   • http://www.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/RealEstate.xml
     
   • http://feeds.realestatejournal.com/wsj/realestate_journal_commercial?format=xml
     
   • http://online.wsj.com/xml/rss/3_7401.xml
     
   • And don't forget to add this one (which is the feed for this blog!) : http://feeds.feedburner.com/SpaceDatabaseTechnologyAndStrategy
     
   
   
3. Now you can scroll through the news really fast - I told you it was easier and faster than the paper!
   
4. To publish your news source we will use the share feature of Google Reader. At the bottom of articles you want to publish, select the share button at the bottom of the article.
   
   
5. All of your shared news items are available on a web page that you can find under "Your stuff/Shared Items" click on the link on the right "at this web page"
   
   
6. You can email this address to your colleagues, or you can simply select the content, paste it into an email and send it out periodically.
   
7. Congratulations, you now have a sophisticated email news letter with links to all the sources!

Give it a try right now. In twenty minutes, you will be an internet publisher and you won't be spending any more time to do it than it takes to read news online.