Trulia Throws Agents a Bone
Photo by donegone
Trulia has caught flack the last few weeks over it’s practices of instituting ‘no-follow’ tags on its links to its broker partners.
I’ll spare you a rehashing of the controversy (more here, here and here) but today they extended an olive branch to the Realtors they may have ticked off.
Now individual agents can brand their listings on Trulia’s search results. Brokerages have long been able to place their logo on the listings (at a price), now agents can associate their name and photo with their listings. For free.
Why do this? From their blog:
• Increased online visibility: Your photo and contact info on all of your listings.
• Connections with serious consumers: Emails from active home buyers & sellers sent directly to you
• Stats to share with sellers: Tell your clients how many people view their listings every week
• Open house advertising: Market your open house to thousands of local buyers
The link on the listing drives back to your profile (here’s mine) on Trulia where I’m told you they’ve upped the number of naked links (i.e. sans no-follows tags) you can have in your profile to 5 from 2.
Seems like a half-decent attempt to try and satisfy their critics - we’ll see if it mollifies the crowd however. Thoughts?
To get started branding your listings, head over here.
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Rudy from Trulia | May 21, 2008 | Reply
Hi Joel!
We’ll write more about this on the Trulia blog tommorrow, but there is one piece of the pie that you left out. When an agent brands their listings on Trulia (for free), those listings show up in their Trulia Profile. Listings links from the Trulia Profile are also “naked”. More soon.
Rudy
SMG
Maureen Francis | May 21, 2008 | Reply
Rudy emailed me a bit ago and I branded most of my listings right away. Glad to have this opportunity. It bugged me that only my brokerage was branded. I am happy with the five links.
Teresa Boardman | May 21, 2008 | Reply
There are so many places to advertise properties online that I am not sure if one site will have any impact on my business. there are many sites where I can do all the things you mention. I’ll try to get excited about what Trulia does
Chris Shouse | May 21, 2008 | Reply
Hooray for Trulia I am happy they stepped up to the plate.
Mike | May 21, 2008 | Reply
I have started doing single property websites and I notice that Trulia trumps me every time for the first few weeks. I have never gained a lead or had my listing shown due to a Trulia listing.
I prefer to be first on the search for that address site immediately and I would rather gain the benefit of my work on a site than help Trulia.
Postlets, which I love so far, doesn’t even come up in the search results but they send the listing out to Trulia and others. I think I will drop Trulia from the feeds when I put listings in Postlets.
anon | May 21, 2008 | Reply
And a not very meaty bone it is.
Rudy happily trumpets that your links will be competing with links to your listings - links that do not link back to your site.
Andew | May 21, 2008 | Reply
small problem (or big): very few consumers know about trulia.
Richard Dale-Mesaros | May 21, 2008 | Reply
Hmmmm, at least Trulia have the foresight to make changes and take action. Maybe if the good ol’ MLS were to become a bit more transparent and do a better job of keeping up with the latest applications for search, they might stand a chance of hanging onto what’s left of their status as the industry standard.
Thanks for keeping us posted, Joel,
Richard
Chief Deal Weaver
http://www.BlackWidowNetwork.com
Missy Caulk | May 22, 2008 | Reply
Fantastic, no bone throwing here. I love it ! When and branded all my listings. I could find all but one. But, will email Rudy today. Not sure why sent through KW feed and vlflyer. But, this is a great addition.
Eric Bramlett | May 22, 2008 | Reply
From an SEO perspective, this is them breaking the old bone up into 5 pieces, and throwing it to the agent. The amount of PR a page passes is divided among the number of outbound links on a page. Here’s a good breakdown of Page Rank from SEOMOZ.
If you don’t want to read all of that, I snipped the most pertinent slide here.
Jake | May 22, 2008 | Reply
I think the real story here is the email feature. Trulia started as a click-thru model, much like Google Base. Every little feature they add, keeps you on Trulia longer and not clicking thru to the Realtors website. Now consumers can even contact the listing agent directly from Trulia with out ever going to that agent’s website. Trulia used the click-thru model to get Realtors to send them listings, by describing how Trulia would drive that traffic to the Realtors website. Now that they have the listings, they will focus on keeping the consumers on their website longer and longer which will help them monetize their website.
Trulia has to make this change; they can not go on with their original business model.
CJ | May 22, 2008 | Reply
Good move. But I would still like to have the option of inputing listings manually instead of waiting for Trulia to pull from my vflyer or postlets feed. And I would like to be able to directly enter Open Houses instead of emailing them in. Ya listening, Rudy?
retrove | May 22, 2008 | Reply
It will help the satisfy the agents for now but in the long run I suspect Trulia will probably have to do more to continue pleasing the agents with the symbiotic relationship.
T’s monetization model is initially similar to R and agents have always had an issue with this, so there is no reason why it would be different with T. When you consider that R already has about 2-3 times the amount of visitors and many agents don’t find value from R… T needs to be able to provide real value beyond just traffic.
The RE communities request cannot fall onto deaf ears at T like they do at R due to T’s dependence on the RE community for listing data which is why they were quick to provide these perks. The T crew is very smart and part of the reason for the new ad network is probably in anticipation that they may have difficulty in monetizing the agent community directly in the future.
Rudy from Trulia | May 22, 2008 | Reply
Hi CJ!
Awesome meeting you at Unchained.
You can manually upload your listings and open houses for free on Trulia. Just visit the link below:
http://www.trulia.com/submit_listings/
Go for it CJ
Best,
Rudy
Social Media Guru at Trulia
P.S. I have a lot of blog comments and emails to catch up on due to my travel and meeting schedule this week.
retrove | May 22, 2008 | Reply
@Jake - great observation and one that many more will notice as time progresses.
Interested in your thoughts with this…
“Trulia has to make this change; they can not go on with their original business model.”
A) why do you think they can’t afford to drive the traffic directly to agent sites?
B) What happens if some big brokers start to pull feeds based on the current model of T trying to keep users on the site vs. passing along as you have indicated?
Chelle | Jun 1, 2008 | Reply
It’s certainly a start…will be interesting to see how this one evolves.