E&0 – Editorial and Opinion
This Month’s E&O is written by Scott Hack, a REALTOR selling homes in Oldham County Kentucky.
Have an opposing view? We welcome it! Please contact us! We want your voice to be heard.
One of the first things real estate agents usually say when asked about Realtor.com, is how expensive it is to advertise on the site. And while Realtor.com provides “free” advertising for listings, many agents go ahead and pay for the extra listing enhancements because it is expected/demanded by their clients.
Well congratulations! Now you have the opportunity to do it on Trulia as well. Various listing packages are available that include Basic, Starter, Plus, and Deluxe. Prices CURRENTLY range from “free” to $79/month.
So agents, you now have a brand new additional place to open your wallet & spend your money.
As consumers see Trulia (and other national listing aggregators like Zillow, etc) constantly being promoted by real estate agents, they will expect/demand that their agents spend their advertising dollars on those advertising venues – and they most certainly will insist that their home has the listing enhancements (that are available for a fee).
And unfortunately for agents, its not likely to end there. As the national listing aggregators continue to gain prominence in the search engines like Google, consumers will continue to become more brand aware of the national listing aggregators because they are being promoted by the real estate agents themselves. This will allow the aggregators to stagger their future price increases for listing enhancements over time, and to raise them as they gain dominance. Once they become a household name like Google, or Ebay – they can pretty much name their price, and real estate agents will have to pay it. (Don’t think so? Ebay doesn’t even rank #1 in Google for “online auctions”. They are middle of page 1. But because they have become a household name, nearly everyone uses them and happily pays whatever fees Ebay wants to charge them.)
So a hearty congratulations to all agents out there. Instead of 1 site you don’t own to spend your advertising dollars on, you now have 2. One wonders….how long before we’ll see 3? or even 4?
Or will agents realize that the national aggregation sites are not “free”? And that they are merely a bill waiting to happen. And while there may be those that feel that $79/month CURRENTLY represents a good value today, how would they feel tomorrow if it became $179/month? $279/month? $579/month? Once aggregator sites gain dominance in the minds of consumers like Ebay, those sites can charge virtually any fees they want of real estate agents – and agents will feel the need to pay it.Outbreak buy
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Great points. I feel that the fight (for me) against my direct competition (Zillow, Trulia) is becoming more and more difficult. There are so many different ways to market a property for my sellers other than advertise on the “almost accurate” real estate websites such as those two.
Thank you for posting this. The more us agents know about the ultimate motives of these big corporate websites, the better. Maybe we all can do our part to offer better information than these websites that don’t really offer any accurate, substantial data for consumers.
Sure Trulia and Zillow are becoming the next realtor.com, but really, I’m not worried about them. I’m scared out of my boots of google. Not only do they know everything about us (email, location, personal information we don’t share with friends), but they’re smarter than all these other companies, too! I had a client that joked they should use a google app instead of a realtor. Not too long, they will push Trulia out (or just buy them), and then invade our space! Forget paying to be on it, they will only make it easier for sellers to fight us on commission. That’s a much more expensive proposition.