Realtor.com Pencil Sharpener
By: Russell Shaw,
NoHassleListing.com,
Post Archive,
RSS FeedPosted: Friday, October 12th, 2007, 6:30 pm MST
Category: Blogging, Disintermediation, Marketing, Realty Reality
Last year I paid Realtor.com about $3,300 to enhance my listings. Now they want to charge me $14,000 for the same thing. Dean Selvey’s rate went from $3,800 to $30,000. Those numbers are not typos. Dean no longer does business with them. I told my sales rep that I would not pay it and that I did not want “a special deal for me”. I wanted their rates put back where they were for everyone. They were supposed to call me. They didn’t call and I don’t believe they are going to call.
I’ve been through this with them before. Several years ago I flew to Homestore and met with them and got them to put the rates back for everyone. It was the bizarre rates they wanted for posting virtual tours that time. The people I met with then are not there any longer. It is now called “Move”.
They have a pattern of doing outrageous things to Realtors with their prices – this isn’t new. It is despicable.
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57 Comments so far
I love it!
I fell off my chair laughing. !!!
Where does one find art like that.
[...] 2- A large share of the agents feel ripped off by this arrangement. I have never seen it better presented than a recent article by the famous Russell Shaw. Just read this please and understand, you don’t need Realtor.com. [...]
Who loves these guys anyway?
haha This just absolutely goes to the heart of Gregs message about vendors raping agents, if it’s not vendors, we’re being eaten alive from the inside by our own. The flipside of the same coin to add to this equation are now lead generators reselling our buyers back to us. the only way it stops is retards that would pay a grand a year to network, or 33k for a realtor.com listing to just say NO. It isn’t hard, simply practice…
Roy Rogers – John Wayne – Superman – Sandy Koufax – Russel Shaw.
[...] I came across this post – <b>Realtor</b>.com Pencil Sharpener – and thought it was worth sharing. I hope you find it interesting too and take the time to read some of the other articles on their site. Last year I paid Realtor.com about $3300 to enhance my listings. Now they want to charge me $14000 for the same thing. Dean Selvey’s rate went from $3800 to $30000. Those numbers are not typos. Dean no longer does business with them. … [...]
Not to worry; they will be gone in a couple of years.
Their replacement will be http://www.GoogleRealEstate.com
Russell, We’ve never participated with r.com since the beginning. We feel we are able to get a significantly better ROI with our websites and now our own blog. They’ve always ripped people off, it’s just that now, they think they have us by the ‘you know what’ – they’ll have to think again. If you get the rates reduced – yeah. I feel that if we’d just take a STAND as REALTORS(R) they would be forced to make changes.
Yeah..the more listings you get, the higher the yearly rate. Well, I think it will be a matter of time that Realtor.com will be run-over by other sites like Trulia, Zillow, Craigslist, etc…
Their prices are way to high and they should stop milking agents for money.
Russell-
The first and LAST time I talked to them, their prices made me laugh so much I thought I’d fall out of the chair. Then they offered to work on the price a bit. Ahh, no thanks.
With all the other ways of advertizing available – they’re just not worth it.
Tried it once this last year. Had a contact almost immediately (which, if she ever sells her four-plex, will turn into a couple of purchases.)
Sellers love the enhanced listings, which is the biggest dilemma. They’re looking on Realtor.com and they know that is what catches their eye.
Having said that … no way I’m renewing. The ROI isn’t there.
That was absolutely HYSTERICAL!! That having been said, comments like Richard’s above give me further cause for concern.
Note to Richard…
These other guys: Zillow, Trulia, Googlebase et al are just one more pencil sharpener from the same factory. They are even the same model # (GMYLICYM is the model number on it if you look REAL close on the graphic…grin). It stands for Give Me Your Listings I Charge You Money.
We do have a way to stop this. If we don’t like how it felt with R.com, then get on our knees again?
**cough** Don’t give them your listings **cough**
Our r.com fee has varied between $3,000 – $4,000 per year the last few years. With more listings and longer market times, they’ll probably try to hike it when it comes up for renewal in January. I’ve decided if it comes in higher than $3,500 I am simply going to tell them No Thanks. Period.
My rate last year was $2900. I suspect that movement.com will try the pencil sharpener on me when my contract expires in January. I don’t think so.
Lots of agents are leaving the market, so they need to ream the ones left to turn a profit.
[...] I read one of the BEST posts in recent memory on REALTOR.com and how they are screwing the REALTORS of the country out of MILLIONS every year. Kudos to the bloodhound blog for posting that. A picture TRULY is worth a thousand words! Yet woefully, I started reading the comments….”We will leave R.com if they charge us more than $3,500 this year “ (paraphrase from one comment). Others were similar. [...]
OMG – that is absolutely hilarious!
LOL! Where in the world did you get that graphic? We dumped R.com a few years ago…no regrets.
[...] You don’t have to be a genius to understand the simplicity of logic presented by Russell Shaw’s post about Realtor.com [...]
[...] You don’t have to be a genius to understand the simplicity of logic presented by Russell Shaw’s post about Realtor.com [...]
Realtor.com has always ripped off agents. We can only blame ourselves for that. We continue to provide free content to them so they can charge us astronomical sums for our own information.
[...] From Bloodhound Blog – Realtor.com Pencil Sharpener They have a pattern of doing outrageous things to Realtors with their prices – this isn’t new. It is despicable. (Editor’s note: A must visit, if just for the photo.) [...]
That’s a great pencil sharpener. Is it s real product? If so, where can I order one? I’ll have them ship you one, too, at my expense for your commission.
Great visual, Russell! I paid over $3000 last year as well. Every January we threaten to pull the plug, and every January we wimp out because the sellers like the enhanced ads, and the ads have generated traffic – until now. We aren’t getting the response we used to, and this at a time when our listing inventory is as high as it’s ever been. This could be the year.
[...] My goal here is twofold; First, I want to make it abundantly clear that REALTOR.com is your competition, not your friend. Second, I want to give you some suggestions for better ways to spend your money by suggesting some alternatives for agents to market online. If you don’t believe me, you need to read this article written by Russell Shaw over at Bloodhoundblog about the absurd fees charged by REALTOR.com First, let’s set this up by saying that you must remember that real estate is local by nature and rarely will you find a one-size-fits-all solution that is effective at marketing anything, let alone real estate. [...]
Someone said that trulia, Zillow, craigslist, etc will be the same, but I need to disagree. So far, these models do not charge for listings, as a matter of fact, if they did – they would have none. Their model is similar to Google’s – drive consumers to websites as fast as they can – at least for Google and Trulia. personally, I like choice. Zillow still leaves me burnt due to their evaluations, the newspapers have been ’sharpening’ us for years. We need alternatives. If we give them our listings, and empower them – R will have to improve, or collapse from failure. It astounds me when fellow brokers think that taking our listings or withholding our listings from these ‘other’ sites is a smart move – why would you want to do that? It just makes “R” the destiantion and gives them th eability to charge more… Also if you don’t go on these other sites, your competitor can be there and make themselves look cutting edge. i for one use my franchises syndication to Trulia in listing presentations – and it wins me business – b/c of Trulia – NO, because I know how to explain the value and sell against my competitors lack of knowledge and understanding of today’s & tomorrow’s real estate consumer. R is there because of our MLS’ our MLS fees, etc.. We PAY to even BE on R – it’s called your realtor dues…nothing like a site with 80 ads on the page that charges you to be there….lol. hysterical. I rather know up front what I am paying for, and see direct ROI.
[...] Russell Shaw’s illustration of the Realtor.com pencil sharpener was hugely popular across the RE.net, and one of the posts it inspired, How to Stop getting hosed by REALTOR.com… by Eric Blackwell, is the winner of this week’s Black Pearl Award: Take the money that you would spend on going to REALTOR.com and use it to develop your OWN web presence. Even if all you did was to take that $3,500 mentioned in the comment of the Bloodhound blog and plunked it down on Pay per Click advertising, at $2.00 per click it would still bring 1,750 RELEVANT clicks to your site. Your odds of closing more business than what you are getting from R.com are MUCH better! [...]
This week’s Odysseus Medals have been posted…
at the Bloodhound Blog for the best writing in the real estate blogosphere. Joshua Marks wins this week’s…
[...] Oh sweet mother of fluffy bunnies Russell Shaw lets everyone know which end Realtor.com expects agents to take it in. I predict Russell wins every blog competition he gets entered in for this one. Required Reading. [...]
Now this is hilarious!!! I canned them last November. They drove me crazy with calls. One of their idiots called me at 7 AM, I wasn’t nice. They stopped calling after that, lol.
Great post Russell. Loved it. I noticed a while back that Realtor.com is now letting builders advertise on the site…. Great…
This is hilarious.
[...] Oh sweet mother of fluffy bunnies Russell Shaw lets everyone know which end Realtor.com expects agents to take it in. I predict Russell wins every blog competition he gets entered in for this one. [...]
[...] And the costs for the agents continue to go up. Look at Russell Shaw’s post regarding Realtor.com. Everyone has their hand in the agent or broker’s pocket – tempting us with the latest method to either acquire new business – or sell our inventory. [...]
Russell,
Just wondering if there was something else that caused your pricing to go up so much? I just checked on mine, since it’s due to upgrade in December, and it only went up slightly. My increase was mainly because I jumped into the next pricing category, based on number of listings taken. They base your pricing on the number of listings you took in the last 12 months. Mine came to about a 55% increase, not the 320%+ increase you saw.
It still seems like a lot of money, and I’d like to not pay them anymore myself, but it’s definitely another tool to use when competing for a listing. Do you still think it’s a necessary evil?
That pencil sharpener is a hoot! A little humor really makes a point(no pun intended).
We dropped them at renewal time in September.
[...] Example 1: Bloodhound Blog–This blog has moderated comments and VERY little spam. Nice work Greg. Notice that the thoughts are typically cogent and the discussion lively. Blogs are easier to do than blog farms or forums and many do not consider them a TRUE online community. I beleive that they are. [...]
[...] I have had clients for the last year want to know why I don’t have numerous picture on my listings on REALTOR.com. I explain in great detail that REALTOR.com is provided the same information like that of Yahoo.com but REALTOR.com chooses not to upload all the additional picture because they are trying to hit our pockets for twice the amount I pay to belong to the local MLS (BLC). I found this great article talking about my exact feelings on the wrong way to do business in real estate. Filed under Indiana Real Estate [...]
For a small company performing full service real estate at a discounted price I can never afford to pay the outrageous prices to a organization that I thought was there to help us not hurt us. I refuse every time the agents from Move and REALTOR.com call because in the end they can never support the outrageous prices with the expansion of the internet.
Great Blog
That picture is amazing. Your post has me worried what my renewal prices are going to look like. If they jump anywhere near those types of numbers I will pull the plug and invest the money elsewhere.
[...] I received an email from a friend this morning…the essence of it was that Trulia is now “offering” us REALTORS the opportunity to enhance our listings for a modest fee…and I started preparing to post almost immediately. Then I noticed Bramlett had beaten me to the punch. As Bramlett correctly pointed out, we saw it coming. (That’s nothing to brag on…Heck, Ray Charles could have seen it coming.) They (Trulia) are a business after all and sooner or later, we REALTORS who have given Trulia those listings were destined to become Russell’s pencil sharpener. I even commented on his post about it. I am actually sad to be right. [...]
Someone explain to me who put the Realtor in Realtor.com!
I initially had a Realtor.com website, it was $450 a year for garbage. Then came Point2Agent and I had something that was very functional for free (full disclosure: I did upgrade to the full featured service for syndication purposes but was still priced below the Realtor.com site and have had quite a lot of success with it).
What puzzled me from the beginning as a new agent was why my trade association was charging such large amounts for these services and I still was not a featured agent with a featured property (that would cost extra).
Hey, I’m just a dumb old cotton farmer! But I did know how to write .html, I did know that bandwidth and server costs were in a free fall thanks to Moores Law, I did know that an organization that charges substantial member fees and has a substantial paying membership base and which should have a significant existing IT department and sql database should be able to provide an enhanced service to it’s membership base for guess what – nothing extra! I mean aren’t they pulling the data from the MLS for free? These are exactly the things I would expect as a benefit as a member of an association – included in the fee.
So, after no results with the website in the first year I let it go and began wondering why anyone utilized those services.
It floored me when I came to find the Realtor name I was so proud of was not one and the same with Realtor.com . Anyway, the “free” magazine I get each month reminds me of the quality website of the same name, why such low quality for such a well funded association. Our local chamber of commerce provides a better website, exposure for members, and monthly publication for a similar fee and with much higher overhead on a per member basis.
The graphic is really great. Years ago r.com was almost giving away the same service for those brokerages and agents that were part of Cendant. If not mistaken wasn’t homestore part of the Cendant family?
After about 2 years r.com raised their prices into the stratosphere. My board was not submitting our listings to r.com. So why would I renew for r.com. They did not even have a way for an agent to upload listings, if the broker or agent so desired.
Complained to NAR – no response.
I just love the picture. It goes with REALTOR.com perfectly. Does anyone have the e-mail addresses of the REALTOR.com leadership. Articles like this one need to be sent to them so that they know exactly what their image is. I love it, so accurate it hurts!!
I think that R.com knows that most agents don’t like them. They can never please everyone and nor should they try.
One of the previous posts truly hits the nail on the head. We have no one to blame but ourselves. We are the ones that keep renewing our subscriptions for web sites and listing enhancements. Realtor.com wanted $766.00 for an annual fee, as they showed in the past 12 months I had between 11 and 25 listings, SO WHAT! What about the listings that have expired, listings that are still listed, listings that are lost to other agents, listings that are withdrawn? Realtor.com would never base their fee on SOLD listings, oh no, that would be fair and reasonable. Is my anger showing in this post? can you see my red face? I’ve had it with Realtor.com.
I am going to make it my mission to send this blog site to at least (10) agents in my area each evening. I have no idea what one person can do, but I’m going to do it! I called (15) agents in our immediate area and asked if Realtor.com listing enhancements were benefiting them, (13) said NO, absolutely no benefit, one said she felt forced to use Realtor.com, as her clients demanded a web link and photographs on the site, and number (15) said the only benefit is showing the enhanced listing to someone considering listing their home. If you think you are going to receive lots of leads off Realtor.com, think again, any leads are going to be FEW and FAR BETWEEN, how do I know, because I paid the high fees for many years! I was the agent that would go into the agent page and see my listing had been viewed 10,000 times, but NO CALLS, that’s right, NO CALLS, what is wrong with that picture! I urge you to copy and paste this link and let’s do something about a company that is using us for every penny they can squeeze out of us! If agents just said NO to Realtor.com, you can bet they would come off their high horse very quickly.
Bob Hoshall
Bob – you do have to ask the question of where the 10,000 views came from. Was it the listing showing as part of a search or was it actual clicks. Also, how long was the listing on r.com?
These numbers are completely exaggerated. Perhaps a quote for a large office to purchase their Company Showcase product (which gives enhancements to all agents for all listings) would near the figures you threw out there, but from what I’ve seen with other agents…unless an individual agent has over 250 listings for the previous year, they’re not gonna have to pay more than $3500 or so. So let’s be a little more realistic.
Realtor.com is a business and exists to make money, just as we all do. And just like any other popular real estate search that already exists or is in the making. Maybe one day some site will come along and please everyone with low rates and high visibility, but for now…this is about it.
I was surprised to see that this thread is still going…..
This could go back and forth for a long time, BUT it all boils down to something very simple:
There are much better things to do with the amount of money that they (over)charge for their services – period, end of rant.
This is as realistic as it gets. If a person lists 0-3 homes in one year, they are charged $199.00. From 4-10 homes, we are charged $362.00, for 11-25 homes, we are charged $766.00, from 26-50 homes, $1,326.00 and at the 51 mark, $2,001.00. The problem is, just because a home is listed, does not mean it’s going to sell! Many homes are withdrawn, rented, expire and are not relisted, expire and are relisted with other agents, or are taken off the market for one reason or another. I have had dozens of homes listed for several months with over 1,000 views with absolutely NO calls. I again ask, what is wrong with that picture. I have been told over and over again, Realtor.com has fielded so many complaints about the way they figure their fees. If any agent sold every home they listed, the fee schedule would be reasonable, however many listings are lost for whatever reason, yet Realtor.com counts that lost listing against the agent for one full year, and bases their fee on many lost listings. I fully realize any company is in the business to make a profit, but we are placed in a position many times by our clients, where they DEMAND multiple photographs and links on Realtor.com, so it’s not like we have a choice, or at least not a good one! We either pay their fee or loose the listing. This company is there to help us, not squeeze us.
When entire offices purchase a Realtor.com product, their fees are adjusted substantially. What would cost me $766.00 would cost an agent in a larger office 1/3 that amount. Unfortunately, I was not able to get my office to participate in a $27,000.00 deal with Realtor.com, where our individual portion would be reasonable, so I’m still stuck with $766.00 or no Realtor.com listing enhancements, and who wants to see a home front photograph with no interior photographs?
Bob
[...] Russell Shaw’s Realtor.com Pencil Sharpener was a hoot. Maybe I need to start Photoshopping a Realtor.com screwdriver, because that is what ’s happening to us and more importantly our clients. [...]
Ugh…the fees are ridiculous and now I was just reading Eric Blackwell’s post about the unaccounted for listings on various city searches. Amazing what you find when you spend time looking a little closer. Unfortunately, I believe in NJ, alot of clients use realtor.com. They may start to fall off because now the public can search for open houses on garden state MLS, which they couldn’t do before.
good afternoon.
I´d like to buy this pencil sharpener.
Where can i buy ?
Hug
Douglas
buyers shop locally for homes…you don’t need to invest your advertising dollars on realtor.com spend it on your local website or with a reliable SEO consultant that can get your website to rank in your target market.
Jay, I think this is good advice and have been dropping various realtor.com features. I was in a situation where I had alot of money going out on various advertising and this year have focused on taking a closer look and tightening up so to speak. We shall see as its always a work in progress.