Trulia Ropes in Prudential?
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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10 Comment(s)
3 Trackback(s)
- From FBS Blog » Blog Archive » “. . . ultimately the consumer that suffers . . .” | Mar 10, 2008
- From Real Time Paradigm Shifting in The Real Estate and Mortgage Industries at The XBroker | Mar 11, 2008
- From Vertical Search - Exclusivity Deals are Bad for Consumers, Advertisers and Business-- rentBits Rental Blog | Mar 16, 2008
Victor Lund | Mar 10, 2008 | Reply
How could Trulia be getting 4 Million listings from Prudential when Move.com, the supplier of data from all participating MLSs in the United States only reports having 3 Million listings?
Josh Motto | Mar 10, 2008 | Reply
Totally agree… the division of listings to multiple internet destinations ultimately delivers poor customer service. The real winners will be the small and regional independents running their own websites fed directly by the MLS. Consumers will find these destinations not only complete with all listings but also full of details missing from the mass marketers.
Athol Kay | Mar 10, 2008 | Reply
I’m seriously glad Connecticut MLS/Realtor Assoc is moving to a 100% advertising real public version of the CTMLS. If it can catch on it will essentially render everything else pointless ponds of real estate information while the entire lake is going to be open to the public.
Lori Turoff | Mar 10, 2008 | Reply
Keep in mind, though, that user friendly, intuitive sites are still likely to be more favored by the consumer. The internet giants like Trulia and Zillow seem to do the user-interface part of their sites very well while many of the realtor & MLS sites miss the boat. Maybe it will take a site populated with all the active listings, with complete, accurate and factual descriptions that is easy to navigate to really win over the buyers.
Andre | Mar 10, 2008 | Reply
I find it hysterical, really that my fellow brokers still see these sites as interlopers or competitors. For years we have paid newspapers to advertise our listings, and quite frankly over the last 10 years my phone stopped ringing from them. Trulia is no different than Google, they are a vertical real estate search engine - they link to the LISTING broker… why would looking at a broker website with IDX be a better solution? Trulia, Zillow, Cyberhomes, Frontdoor all drive traffic to us. they have awesome tools that consumers love, and quite frankly - my specialty is Selling homes, getting homes closed, managing personalities and helping buyers secure financing - so why would I want to battle experts marketing online? It’s like when all my competitor’s started publishing “newspapers” please… you think the consumer read those when they had the NYTimes and local paper available? So why would we think it is an different in this medium? My listings are on Trulia, i get a ton of visits and I am glad, my website has IDX and it is my job to offer the consumer a quality site, so when they get to my site from Google or Trulia, they stay… that’s what we need to worry about - how do we imporve OUR experience on our sites, so when our clients come from awesome sites like Trulia, i keep them - and they don’t go to YOUR (my competitor) site. Go Trulia, Go Zillow, Go Frontdoor! Get me more visitors!
David | Mar 11, 2008 | Reply
So what does everyone think of google base? Google base accepts feeds from SO many smaller shops that their listing is HUGE, and open to anyone to leverage.
I understand that there is money and deals set up to lock these companies in for 4 million listings.
With google base, I rather have everyone that it looking to SHARE their listings with ANYONE rather than 4 million listings in which only 1 site can show…
I’m telling you what, http://www.propertyqube.com is about to coming out with some new shocking stuff, if you haven’t checked us out yet, do it…
Michael Pierce : Kansas City Real Estate | Mar 11, 2008 | Reply
That is interesting. I post my listings on Trulia already but I know a lot of agents are hesitant to post their listing anywhere. The point is to get the most exposure for your sellers, right?
??? | Mar 11, 2008 | Reply
Joel…I was shocked to see that you actually wrote in your article, “Prudential Real Estate is expected to announce they will be sharing their 4 million listings with Trulia.com.”
Prudential does not have 4 million listings to give. They dont even have enough of a national footprint of brokerages to have anything close to a national IDX site like Remax.com or what the Realogy sites with soon have.
The national inventory of listings as sourced by all MLS’s is just over 4 million. Are you suggesting that Trulia is going to the Yahoo model and creating a MLS search channel on their site in the various markets that Pru has brokerages (in which case it still wouldnt be close to 4 million)? Are are they really just going to feed their own (couply hundred thou)listings to Trulia?
I agree with your assesment at the end that if a company can pull off a tie together of all MLS’s with a great search experience could dominate consumer attraction and crush everyone.
Joel Burslem | Mar 11, 2008 | Reply
@Victor Lund & @??? I’ve updated the post to reflect your comments.
Ken Horst | Mar 12, 2008 | Reply
I think local agents using Wolfnets MapTracks and a combination of SEO and ppc will always put the Trulias and Zillows of the world to shame.
Better search technology and more local inventory.
It seem to me that consumers are getting much better at search and have figured out that if you want to see the mother lode of homes for sale in Portland, Minneapolis or any other city, you type “MLS Minneapolis” into Google versus something genereic like “homes for sale” or “real estate” or “trulia”
Consumer search habits will ultimately dictate who wins.