The Real Estate Coach spills the beans on a new deal to be announced by Prudential at their upcoming National conference in New Orleans.

Prudential Real Estate is expected to announce they will be sharing their 4 million listings with Trulia.com.

From the Coach:

By now most people know that Prudential Real Estate’s “Exclusive” agreement with Yahoo (Real Estate), which allowed Yahoo to use Prudentialproperties.com ’s 4million + listings, and gave Prudential an exclusive on leads) is now ending. No one thought for a moment that Pru was gonna sit still while Realogy teamed up with [Frontdoor] so where would they turn?? Next week at the National conference in New Orleans (which I can not attend – boo hoo) Pru is expected to announce a landmark agreement with powerhouse [Trulia] as the winner of those 4miliion (sic) + listings.

Quite a change from a year ago, when Trulia was kicked out of Pru’s convention.

No word if this will be an exclusive arrangement like the deal that Trulia recently signed with Windermere (or if it’s even true) – if it is though, that’s quite a win for Trulia, who also have industry giant Realogy’s listings and many others already under their belt.

It seems ironic though, with all these brokers now lining up in different camps to feed their listings to the big consumer search destinations on the Internet, that it’s ultimately the consumer that suffers from these alliances being formed.

If I’m trying to search for a house in Portland, I still have to have to go to multiple destinations (Frontdoor has X, Zillow has Y, Trulia has X & Y but no Z) just to get an accurate picture of the complete inventory available on the market.

I’m starting to think the broker feed model espoused by many RE2.0 search sites (despite their early technological lead on the search experience), may ultimately be a losing proposition; especially when faced a renewed push by MLS’ to update their consumer search tools (see New HAR Site Corners Houston Real Estate Search), new MLS based solutions (see Roost.com Kicks over the RE Search Cart), kick-ass IDX based tools (see Estately Schools the Competition) and brokers who build their own kick-ass sites (see New Redfin Features Keep it Ahead of the Pack).

(h/t GeekEstate Blog)

Update: As people in the comments pointed out, Prudential doesn’t have 4 million listings to give. My apologies, the figure was sourced from the originating blog post.

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I stumbled upon this interesting tidbit recently while doing some research for another post. It looks like you can now filter a search for real estate listings by brand using Google.

This looks likes the initial implementation of the deals signed last year to feed listings into Google base (more on StartupSquad).

Right now the results are confined to two brokerages; Prudential California/Nevada/Texas Realty and Keller Williams. Listings are kind of sparse and the search results pages feel half finished so I’m guessing this is still early stages or just a proof of concept.

PruCal/NV/TX listings

Keller Williams listings

Also, no sign of any of Realogy’s listings yet, who have also signed a deal to feed Google Base (see Trulia Lands the Big One).

It raises an interesting question however — do consumers have any brand preference when searching real estate?

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