Sold and let property - should it remain on an estate agent's page?

A recent post from the great blog at Geek Estate Blog comments on the issue of real estate blogging and social media space, subjects close to our hearts and our clients' hearts. Indeed, we are trying to encourage all estate agents, DEAs and the like to create blogs and write more. The property owl system is geared up to help them with the template and format so all they now need is good advice.

To this end, the post is as always helpful, but I would like to pick up on one point. I refer to the final point when it is stated that old properties ought to remain live and available on a page/site.

As a user, there is nothing worse for a real estate search to produce a result as ‘sold’ and then another and then another. I fully appreciate the benefit of keeping good rich content live, but perhaps there is a better way to save this on the blog/page/site? Perhaps link to all that are similar and available from the sold one, although this requires a little work, perhaps have a section for previously sold that redirects users to the ‘available’ property lists?

It could be a valuable discussion, how do we keep the rich content alive without upsetting the user. After all, the user wants ‘useful’ content and a sold property is of no use whatsoever (other than to the agent for search). Until we can think of a way around it, I would say it is better to get rid of sold properties. Please let us know if someone out there has already devised a unique way around this issue.

In the meantime, all property appearing within the property owl property search portal and our estate agent client’s databases will remain ‘sold’ free. The user will only ever see 'available' property.