We are in a period where listings are flying everywhere. You post a listing in one place, it appears on several others. Some you may not even realize you are listed on till you get an inquiry.
Recently, there has been much concern that many of these listing syndication/aggregators are actually using your data to make money off you. And if they aren’t today, they probably will tomorrow.
However, think about this: If everyone buys the up sell, won’t everyone be back to a level playing field with less money in their pockets?
This was one of the main discussions during the CRT moderated Marketing Session during the NAR Expo in Vegas. Another main focal point was that these services are appearing because of the consumer need, A better way to property search. It was inevitable, end of story.
Now we are at a crossroads where every REALTOR or Broker wants to have the most versatile and consumer pleasing search interface. Unfortunately, a REALTOR or Broker can never keep up, and still sell real estate, with these agile, venture funded Technology companies stacked with techno-geeks that may never leave their console. Granted there are a few larger brokerages which can can manage. However, do they have the breadth of data that some of these other services are offering or the ability to continually push the envelope? Such as Points of Interest, School Data, Sold Data, Heat Maps, and Valuation tools. Some may, some may have components. But it gets increasingly harder to keep up. So What is one to do?
I have been advocating for a while that to compete with this phenomenon/trend/need/reality that you have to move search upstream. Right now, there are 1.3million people reinventing the wheel. Move that to the Broker level, you have somewhere between 12,000-15,000 (best guess). Take that one step higher to the source, the MLS, and you have just under 900.
Houston Association of Realtors website is a terrific example of this. You start at the source. The listings are timely. The content is fresh. Since they are part of the ‘Family’ they hopefully won’t try to up sell you. And if they do, your presence on the board helps fight the battle. Leads go to the agent, there is no hocus pocus. Its simple, elegant, and seeing how they are crushing most of the competitors in this arena (26th place in Hitwise Ranking in November), I guess it makes sense. That’s Huge!!!
I religiously encourage brokers and agents to find out what their MLS is doing with this regards. If you can’t do it on that level, move it to the Franchise level, such as what Prudential/REMAX and others are doing.
Simply put, as an Agent, in the masses of 1.3million, keeping your head above water in this technology race is tough one, and you can probably reap more reward by promoting who you are via blogging and other forms of social media, then by using all your resources to build a search site that could be antiquated in the blink of an eye.
In fact, as a consumer, part of how I would choose an agent is that they can outperform me on finding the perfect property by having access to more area knowledge, refined searching techniques and experience I just can’t gain through even the best website. Just cause I use one website to search, doesn’t mean that is the broker/agent I have decided to use.
Excellent post. What I find most interesting about your post is this…
“part of how I would choose an agent is that they can outperform me on finding the perfect property by having access to more area knowledge, refined searching techniques”
I agree. Heatmaps are interesting but I would venture to guess that most will look at it once and end of story. Many of these tools are incredibly neat but at the end of the day, the consumer just want access to all of the listings in their area, regardless of who or how (i.e. FSBO)it is listed because all they want is to find “their” perfect property.
Congrats on the People’s Choice Award from Bloodhound, Chris, and thanks for the great post!
Chris,
Mark Lesswing sent me to the blog when I tried to contact him about the NAR’s new Second Century Ventures Fund. Will we be hearing more about the fund on this blog?
To show you the power of blogs, on 12/16/07 at 2:30 PM I posted about Second Century Ventures Fund. When I Googled “Second Century Ventures” at 3:30 PM, I had the #3 rank: http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&aq=t&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGLG,GGLG:2005-22,GGLG:en&q=Second+Century+Ventures
We Realtors still have the #1 Website for Real Estate in Realtor.com, but if you ad #2, Yahoo Real Estate, and #3, MSN Real Estate, they are bigger than Realtor.com. Google Base doesn’t make it to the top 20, and that’s only because Google has put their time or $Billions behind Real Estate.
Zillow now has 5 ways to determine whether a home is for sale. Why don’t we just tell them and work with them, like so many individual agents and brokers do?
We’re not one of “The Big Boys” on the Internet.
Great post. Keep ‘em coming.
but if you ad #2, Yahoo Real Estate, and #3, MSN Real Estate, they are bigger than Realtor.com.
I have to guess that this phenomenon is due to the realogy brands pumping their 30=% of the listings out to Yahoo, MSN ans AOL thru Front Door. My job as an agent in this craziness is to make as many premutations of my feeds so that I capture 2-5 display slots for each of my listings. By creating discrete display listings- with address, without price,street shot on some front door or entryway on others as the #1 picture, an agent could dominate his zestifarm in this manner. Go with me here a neighborhood has ten houses for sale. If the web sites show 15 houses. 5 are duped houses which have a different presentation package sent to different RE.bots. I don’t think the execution would be too difficult, because every RE.bot scraper grabs different data from the house data. So I’d have MLS package, a Zillow pack, a Trulia pack, an ERA.com pack, and a P2A pack and my weekly Craigslist flyer. And all this is done without enhancing the listings for cash to some re.bot.
To keep the unchained theme going could I call it Zestifarm unchained? Like one of those judo moves where intrepid little agent uses the brute force of the adversary to prevail against all odds in this zestifarm remix.
My question is this: at what point does Realogy with 30% of all listings and a robust listing display system just go for the whole thing? Realogy has announced all listings will appear on the brand sites a la Re/Max. ERA,C21,Coldwell, Sotheby’s and coming soon, Better Homes will have it. When you have all the listings and 25% of the boots on the ground, is NAR even relevant at that point?
Great post.
In regards to the last paragraph…I personally find that buyers want to be able to see all the listings and have as many search capabilities as possible. Like you said…just because they can see all the listings does not give them knowledge or experience. That is why I am important to them. My experience allows me to provide them with knowledge and information that they can not get on any website. Finding listings to look at that fit their criteria is the easy part. It is not until you look at the home that you see the whole picture and that is where the knowledge and expertise of a professional is most important.
As for finding them the “perfect house”…I am in a large enough market that I can find someone what they tell me they are looking for at any given time (for at least a fair value depending on the popularity of their preferences). If that is what buyers wanted, I could narrow it down to 4 or 5 homes, preview them and show them the one that is most perfect for them…write up the contract and we would be done. What I have found though is that buyers want to pick the homes to look at and need to progress through the looking process by trial and error. I can’t just tell people this is their perfect house or “you dont want that one”. They need to see a certain number of homes, both good and bad, before they are comfortable making a buying decision. They also sometimes need to see that their perfect home is also the perfect home of a lot of other buyers and sells very fast.
This is also evident to me anytime a buyer says something like “The most important thing for me is a quiet back yard” and then asks me to look at a home that backs to a highway. I tell them it backs to a highway, it may not be the best for resale, and I remember them saying that they want a quiet backyard…but they still want to look at the home. There is nothing wrong with that, this is just part of the process. Once they look at the home first hand they see these things for themselves but ultimitely they need to reach that decision on their own, I cant reach that decision for them. Seeing that home means they most likely will not look at a home that backs to a highway again but they still needed to see it to confirm or remind themselves of this. If a buyer wants me to find them homes I will be glad to do so, but most buyers want the ability to find the home that makes their viewing list.
I dont find this with out of town buyers as much but with local buyers this is often the case. When I first started in this business, the consumer did not have access to all the listings so I would basically pick all the homes we looked at. I feel buyers are much happier now that they are able to see all the listings and choose the homes they want to see.