The economy is booming and so is the real estate market. With the global marketplace increasingly moving to the Internet, it makes sense that one of the fastest-growing groups of Web Surfers are folks shopping for homes online. Realtors, agents and brokers are responding to this trend with commercial websites of their own, promoting their services and properties with photos and virtual tours, and offering up online relocation packages in the form of community and school information links. Some even wrap up the deal with links to online-approval-in-minutes mortgage companies. All that's left is to find a way to process a house key over fiber optic lines!

Recent hacker attacks on commercial sites such as Yahoo.com, eBay.com, and Amazon.com, though, have drawn serious attention to security issues. How can you make sure your web presence is professional and secure?

First, go to a qualified web developer, one who works with commercial applications every day, not someone who has put together a few personal pages meant for entertaining family and friends. As tempting as it may be to go the amateur route to save money, you're in business and you'll want to project a polished, professional image. New designers often resort to flashy graphics that might be great for a gaming site, but do nothing to portray you as a trust-worthy professional who has your clients' best home buying interests in mind. Or maybe the text and graphics are centered on the page and the client has to scroll down and down and down to read it all, or worse, the text is overlapping the onscreen tables and spilling into the margins – a sure sign of a beginner and absolutely not the polished image you want. Find a commercial designer who knows what they're doing from the beginning – it will save you time and money in the long run.

What sort of security measures should you expect of your web designer? Ask if they will imbed watermarks in your proprietary code and any images you put online. In the event someone does get hold of them, you can always prove you had them first – they've got some secrets hidden deep inside the code that only you and your designer know.

Ask if they use a tamper-resistant graphics program like Java Applets. The Java Applets we use for our navigational buttons and custom banners make them impossible to copy. Copycats may be able to save the image, but they won't function without the code and for that we work exclusively in PHP and MySQL, programming languages that cannot be copied with the View Source option available on most browsers. The HTML code is still there, but without the PHP and MySQL components, the dynamic aspects won't work. Any designer worth their weight will be able to offer you the same level of service.

Tell them you want administrative access so you can constantly keep your information fresh and updated. This serves two purposes: first, you won't be paying additional programming fees whenever you need to update a price change or add a new listing, and second, thieves will likely have outdated information while you will always be on the cutting edge of providing services to your clients.

Consider using secure areas that require user names and passwords so that only those people who have your permission may access them: chat boards, email, property portfolios, etc. This private information is stored on your server and is not accessible via the Internet.

Make sure there are copyright notices on every single page on your website. These should include the year, the name of the holder of the copyright, and a statement of the rights covered (i.e. Copyright ©2000 Realty Times. All Rights Reserved.) and clear instructions that you fully intend to to protect your rights and have taken legal measures to that end..

Put your company name and other personal keywords into the meta tags for each page. When the search engines catalog your pages, you'll be able to search for those keywords and any stolen pages will come up in the search results. Should you find some pilfered pages, contact the person with a firm request that they remove those stolen pages immediately, and CC: their Internet Service Provider (ISP), who likely will take a very dim view of their services being used to break federal law. To find them, run a “WHOIS” search at www.Tierranet.com – type in the thief's website address, click “search,” then click on “More detail” and they will provide you with all the information you need to contact the website owner and their ISP. Meta tags do not show up as visible text on the browser, so the thief has to be somewhat savvy to know where to find them and how to change them.

You should have full control of your website content, including text, photos and original graphics – it's your intellectual property and no one should be allowed to use it without your permission. Federal copyright laws do apply. Layout is layout, though, and if folks are bent on copying a style, I'm not sure there's any way to stop them. There are only so many ways, after all, to place items on a webpage. You might consider it the sincerest form of flattery and be done with it.

One caveat: showing other agents' listings is common practice and when you've got other agents' listings on your page and they know it, expect them to direct their clients to your page to see the photos if they don't have a site themselves. This happened to one of our clients. The listing agent sold the property using photos on her page. She's still waiting to see what their broker's decision will be regarding sharing the commission. This is something that the Realtor associations will likely have to tackle internally and decide on a blanket policy that will be fair to all parties.

Also See:

How to Handle Theft of Your Content

Published: February 29, 2000

Use of this article without permission is a violation of federal copyright laws -- http://www.loc.gov/copyright.

Copyright © 2000 Realty Times^®. All Rights Reserved.