The thing with these types of people (realtors, restaurant mangers, etc.) is that you can make something extremely easy to use but there will always be effort in producing new content; effort they are not willing to expend. Time and time again I've worked with people who couldn't be bothered to enter the data for their new listing or upload photos. They always feel like it is busy work and better farmed out to an assistant or done by myself at a unsustainable cost. Maybe the problem is that most of these people are technically inept and/or can't type more than 10wpm, I don't know. I've completely given up on anything real estate related and refuse to take any projects in that space because the failure to produce new content and maintain a web property always gets reflected back on me, as if I made something too hard for them to do. Plenty of dead-simple options exist to create and maintain a site, I find the issue is lack of cooperation with the site's owner to produce new content.

Now in the food service space, you could easily auto-generate an update based on the POS inventory. The problem there is many restaurants use a system like Micros, which has data access, but refuses to open it up to third-party vendors. If Micros ever wised up and opened an app store where customers could install approved and signed apps, the person who bridges inventory to web will cash in and retire early.

"Maybe the problem is that most of these people are technically inept "

First let me say that your comments are dead on from my experience (and I'm even talking outside and before the internet dealing with small business in general as well as the people you mention.)

I don't think it's inept I think small business people are "shiny ball" driven and they react to things (deadlines, fines, customers, tax filings, supplies running out) they are used to going at their own pace and as a result have a hard time having the discipline to do things like this on any type of regular basis.

Perhaps the way to handle this is more or less some kind of mechanical turk.

If you tell the realtor "guy from India will be calling every 10am Tuesday" that creates the shiny ball that forces him (like taxes that are due) to get his house in order. Just a thought. I know when I was in a different business we did something similar and had decent results. We also did everything we could to make it easy for someone.

Obv. your time is worth more. But perhaps there is someone who could do the "teeth pulling" at a lower rate.

After all with video chat and all of that it's not a non-starter.

To tackle just this problem, we created this: http://wigwamm.co.uk - would appreciate feedback.

A restaurant get's more hits on their Yelp page than their actual website. When shit get's super fragmented it helps everyone involved to have an aggregator. It's why the App Store works so well.

It seems to me that LinkedIn would be well positioned for something like this. Allow pro users to create microsites.

I think the canonical answer to this for restaurants is Facebook page + Google Maps listing + Yelp listing.

too! Seriously, it's not that hard.

"getting it to a single page site that you host in the cloud."

you mean, like a website?

There are a million canonical answers to building a web site for a real estate agent, everything from Pinterest to a simple Wordpress with a domain centric theme.

Too me this space is about lead generation. Something like channel advisor for services.