Curtis Reddehase, a real estate broker in Austin Texas recently wrote announcing his decision regarding Listing Syndication
and why his brokerage will no longer be participating in that form of marketing. Several reasons were cited, but the 2 main reasons boiled down to:
1. He doesn’t want his listings to be utilized by the national sites, as a means of generating advertising revenue. He goes on to explain that the national real estate listing aggregators take his listings, use that to drive up traffic to their website – and then sell that traffic to advertisers for profit.
2. He has NEVER had a productive lead generated for as long as he has been participating in real estate listing syndication.
The use of real estate listing data, and determining what are the long term impacts of listing syndication, continue to be topics that are heating up and gaining momentum within the real estate industry.
Future questions that the real estate industry will have to deal with regarding this topic include:
Does listing syndication establish these national listing aggregator sites, or the local broker as the authority for the local real estate market?
If the national listing sites become established as the authority – what sort of fees will they start charging back to the local brokers?
Is it worth it in the short term to try to pick up a deal today by syndicating to these national aggregators? Is it worth it in the long term?
These and many more questions need to be answered. The real estate industry will have to continue to evolve to stay current with the ever changing technology that becomes available.
The Curse of the Jade Scorpion divx
Good content! What is the best and cheapest form of advertising listings? I like syndication because if a customer does find it and call me I don’t have to pay the co-broke. Any Ideas?
I find this blog post so good, I just have to comment again. I do agree fully that a national site could almost be taking the place of an mls just on a national level. To put an end to the national sites, I believe is to hire Eric Blackwell as an seo coach get more organic exposure through seo rather than simply uploading a listing that syndicates nationally which seems like the lazy thing to do.
The really important point of this article is how your basically helping your competition and yes national real estate sites are your competition in the SEO arena.
The more content they get the stronger they can become. They are designed to sell traffic and or banner ads on there sties.
These are some great points. I never saw listing syndications this way. It looks like it will hurt us in the long run and I will talk to my broker to see what he thinks because he likes the idea of listing syndications.
The useful article and have a great points in it. The Curtis Reddehase, a real estate broker in Austin Texas recently wrote announcing his decision regarding Listing Syndication.
I think the answer is where does your fiduciary lie? If your fiduciary is with the seller, then the seller’s best interests are served by making sure potential buyers can find out the home is for sale. I just plan my business model for “one side” of the transaction and charge accordingly. Buyers are using the internet to find houses. They may or may not bring a buyer agent.
My practice to do both syndication and have a strong SEO presence. I have a few hundred first page rankings for various key word combinations, and it depends on which search engine buyers are using, whether they find me or my competition.
At the end of the day, who are you working for, are you compensated for your work and expertise when the house sells and if so, then do what will sell the house.
If the syndicators didn’t make money they would not exist. Just like a brokerage firm or any other company. They promote our listing for no charge to us and they get to sell ad space. No skin off my nose. Don’t buy the leads or participate in PPC if you don’t like it. If find those to be effective and will continue to use them.
Thanks!
@ Ken Jansen – Obviously you view syndication as just another means of marketing your listings. Allow me to play devil’s advocate for a bit…..
If your #1 priority is the seller’s absolute best interest, then why don’t you:
A) Refund 100% of your commission back to them, and work for free? After all, that would benefit the seller the most.
B) Place FRONT page ads on the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, etc to promote your listings? That certainly would help your seller get more exposure! Cause it doesn’t matter if its cost effective – as long as its good for the seller, right?
The point being is that you have to take reasonable measures to ensure your long term viability to have a business in the first place.
Listing syndication at the very least, creates additional competition for you for visibility in the search engines. And it has potential to create “bills waiting to happen” (through enhanced listing fees, etc that would get implemented at a later date). And if you add in the additional “features” that those sites provide by answering questions, etc – it all collectively helps establish THOSE other sites as the authority for your market instead of you. If a client has a question, they go to THEM and get the answer. Not you.
Everyone knows what it means to Ebay or Google something. If the national listing syndication sites can establish themselves as a “verb” in people’s vocabularly, they can then start charging you whatever fees they want, and your clients will insist that you pay it.
Think of it like a crack dealer giving away “free” samples – does the crack dealer expect to make a profit? Absolutely. Listing syndication is most certainly not “free”. It has a high price that just hasn’t been paid – yet. Right now, its all about jockeying for position to establish themselves (or you) as the authority for your market.
I agree with Roberts first comment. I want to double dip on my listings. So the more places it is the better chance we have at that. I out rank all those sites anyways
@ Mike – if you read Robert’s 2nd post, it actually shows a deeper understanding of the situation – and a change of heart.
And I just googled Dallas real estate: You don’t outrank them. Trulia & Zillow both are on the first page. You are on page 2.
Coincidence? I think not.
And while you may lay claim to some of the secondary markets & long tails (for now), all you are doing is setting the nationals up to establish THEM as the authority, not you – and allowing them to hand you a BIG bill later on down the road.
Huge cost long term for :cough: “free” :cough: advertising today.
I dunno, as a consumer – I go to Trulia and Zillow so i can search, get more data and find a broker to do business with. I find it funny that brokers think that not being on a syndication site gives them better SEO ranking. Oh well, I guess I’ll never understand the brokerage model – then again, by the comments I read here, looks like some brokers don’t understand consumers. Shame.
@ Mike – You bring up 2 issues:
1. SEO
2. Brokers not understanding consumers.
@ SEO – Since there are only 10 spots on the first page of a search engine like Google, it is quite competitive to rank on the 1st page. The nationals you mention ARE COMPETING for high ranking & placement at a local level for the various real estate searches – and are competing against the individual agents that are striving to achieve a presence within their local market.
They are competitors for search engine visibility. And the listings are the ammunition for them to achieve those rankings.
@ Brokers not understanding consumers – As a consumer, how would you like to have a FULL FRONT PAGE ad in the New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, on park benches, bill boards and a SuperBowl Ad on TV for your $50,000 condo that you have for sale? As a consumer, you’d probably like that, right?
So, why doesn’t your real estate agent provide that for you? Because if they did those kinds of advertising expenditures, they would quickly find their costs in advertising outstripping their net revenue – go broke and out of business.
The national listing aggregators are looking (primarily) toward the real estate agent’s wallet as their chief means for revenue generation. See this article here about the new “enhancements” that Trulia just rolled out: http://www.realestateindustrywatch.com/e0-editorial-and-opinion/
Syndication, whether it be sooner or later, creates a bill waiting to happen.
We have the same decision to make in the Nashville market as Point2Agent has just successfully invaded our MLS with a partnership that benefits them more than the real estate agents. Has this happened in your market as well? I cannot see why our local MLS board decided to give these jokers free reign.
Postlets is very popular and so I posted my listings. Several of them. They syndicate to Ooodle and Backpage. The broker information was missing from Ooodle and Backpage. Several agents in our area have been fined and disciplined due to this. I understand there is a licensing agreement conflict between Postlets and Backpage whereby the broker informaion is dropped off. Too late for these folks, but syndication is dangerous if the agent is not protected. The sites are out to make a buck at our expense. I contacted Backpage and Postlets and understand that this has been an issue for 3 years. Our RE governing authorities alledgedly have tried to contact them as well to no avail. So, in order to uphold the law, the agents are disciplined for using these sites. Kind of a conflict here when you see that the MLS is advocating use of these sites. They are protected I will bet. But if they accidentally drop off information the agent is the one to suffer.
Hi Jon,
The overlooked caveat to having my clients best interest in mind first and foremost is of course according to our written listing agreement. I my listing agreements I specify a fee for my services. I also spell out what I do and do not do for my listings so there is no surprises on either side. The sellersOffering maximum reasonable exposure seems to be a worthwhile cause to my listing clients. Syndicated listings to not increase my hard costs for listing a home and in most cases shorten the listing time needed for it to sell, thus decreasing the time I need to input.
To me, having great exposure of my listings gives
1) Greater exposure to me
2) Greater exposure to my brokerage
3) Increases the odds of someone seeing the home, with or with a buyer agent
4) Just like I don’t turn away people at an open house who are working with a buyer agent, I would not turn down someone looking at house online who might be working with a buyer agent.
I think the real estate industry has a choice to either be the source of current, reliable accurate timely information – or someone else will.
Thanks again. Great post and discussion.
I feel bad for his clients. I am sure they have no idea about how this affects them. Their homes will simply get much less exposure than if they were syndicated.
I had a client send me a listing from Homesdotcom and the listing was canceled over a year ago. She did not understand why the home was listed if it was canceled. She asked me to double check to make SURE it wasn’t listed. The problem with Pointtwo and the like is the agent is responsible for putting accurate information out there and responsible for taking it down. The listing syndication is a good tool to get a listing but in the end it can cause a lot of frustration. Listing syndication IMO was more important in the past but has less relevance as times change. If you google address’ in Omaha you will find Realtordotcom has stolen first place for almost every address.
My team is consistently hearing from folks inquiring about why they haven’t received listing updates for one property or another they have found on the syndication sites. In most instances, the properties in question have been expired, pending or sold listings. We are gathering loads of experience in explaining same to buyers. The syndication sites have some kinks to work out to best serve the public’s need for information.
We just had IDX become available in our province(love it!!) in Canada and I’m hoping that large sites like trulia will stay away from our market place. We have enough competition on the web already!
I agree that national sites use our own work against us. Is it possible that we can set a precedent that IDX info can not be displayed on sites that feature outside advertising on the same page? Or must be clearly branded with the listing broker’s information?
Houston MLS boasts HAR.com that features agent info alongside the property listing. I think if we organize our MLS’s in that way we can compete with the national sites and offer a better customer experience that better represents real estate agents and our business.
We owe it to our customers to maximize their opportunity to be seen. If we don’t do it, someone else will.
@ Jason – Hey Jason, thanks for the comment. In response to this remark: “We owe it to our customers to maximize their opportunity to be seen.”
I would respond with 2 items:
1. Syndicating the listings provides a false perception of benefit that quite simply doesn’t actually translate for most persons. Its merely perception that you are “maximizing” exposure.
Its easy math. Zillow is promoting that they are getting around 6 million visitors per month.
And, they also have around 6 million listings.
So, 6 million visitors per month / 6 million listings = 1 visitor per month per listing. Does that sound like an overwhelming powerhouse of “leads”?
And thats not even taking into account RELEVANT traffic. How many of those “visitors” are the sellers themselves looking at their own listing? Or are the listing agent checking it out?
or better yet – how many of those visitors are just there for the Celebrity house articles?
Almost any agent’s website will generate WAY more traffic than 1 visitor per month viewing their client’s listing – and its going to be WAY more relevant than someone wanting to read about the latest Celebrity home in California that came on the market.
2. If you owe it to your customer to “maximize their opportunity to be seen”. Why don’t you take out a Superbowl ad and put their $100,000 condo on it? Or advertise their property by taking out a full page ad on the front page of the New York Times?
The point being its because it doesn’t generate sufficient Return On Investment (ROI) for you to stay in business. I’d argue that for the vast majority of persons, listing syndication generates a negative ROI, where it costs them more directly (either through featured agents/listings/zip codes) or indirectly (by increasing competition in Google/Internet) – than any alleged benefit that they get by syndication in the first place.
I use truilia and zillow just to place a link to my website on them and nothing else. I do not participate in their gimmicks to keep their site in the front. This is a great article even though it was written some time ago, it is still relevant today.
I must admitt I have done VERY WELL with syndication, problem is you really have to work it. Go in and make sure you claim your listings, sometimes monthly. pain yes but I have generated a great number of leads from it. I average about 40 listings at any given time and the value of it is only worth the time if you do carry a lot of listings. I have also used point2agent and found it a good bang for the buck. I do however HATE Listhub and they do rip your listings off.
Excellent post! I have always been against syndication for the simple reason that these site are competing with me locally in the SERPS. There is simply no way to dispute this. Syndication is a lazy form of marketing that really results in minimual leads. Most agents, however, do not have the type of website that can compete locally, so they end up thinking that syndication will help them and their clients. The numbers simpy don’t bear this out.
The analysis of 6 million vistors vs number of listings vs number of actual viewings is a great one.
I feel like users are becoming more educated as to the pros and cons of these national sites. While I feel like not sharing this information is a great idea, we still have to do what is best for our sellers and getting their house out there by all means is it. I think that SEO is evolving where users will have a bigger say in what places and users like the details and local knowledge that these small local sites bring.