They don’t ALWAYS provide national level exposure to our listings, (and that is above and beyond the fact that most will not disclose the actual traffic figures of their local property searches so we can see ACTUALLY how much exposure we are getting for the listings that we are GIVING.
For this example, I am going to use REALTOR.com, but the example is by no means limited to them. Same scenario applies across many of the bots.
Let’s say you are looking on our site for a home around $500,000 in Louisville. One of the current active listings is this one. Great right? and exactly what you were looking for on the east side of Louisville in one of the MANY quiet suburbs…
Fast forward a day or so…
So now you go to LIST a similar property (same suburb) for a potential client. PROUDLY, you proclaim that you provide ENHANCED Listings via REALTOR.com. (At a cost of hundreds or even thousands of dollars a year to you, the REALTOR). The client thinks, “GREAT. My REALTOR is getting me EXPOSURE…” Isn’t that SWELL…
HERE’S the rub:
Type in REALTOR.com (as a typical relocation person or anyone else would…).
Type in LOUISVILLE, then choose Kentucky and then search for $500,000 homes…
ALL you see are homes with the CITY field in IDX that says LOUISVILLE!!! This means that ANY listing that does not have the city LOUISVILLE in its address is getting little to NO exposure in REALTOR.com and HAS NOT BEEN. Nice job guys…REALTORS pay for enhanced listings that are seen by NOONE (err…except the very few who a) understand this and b) are prescient enough to know that La Grange is a city in Kentucky and not just a cool song by ZZ Top. and c) type that individual city in the advanced search.) How many do you think THAT is…ummm…Next to NONE, in my opinion.
And before any of the other National sites (bots, franchise chain sites, scrapers or others) start bragging about how much better THEIR presentation of listing data is than REALTOR.com, be forewarned – This is the FIRST of multiple posts on the subject…
The bots want us to SELL our listing clients that live in the suburbs on the fact that they are providing NATIONAL level exposure…
Hmmm….at least in the case of suburbs, that is currently effectively not happening in many cases.
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.
Jim Rake says:
Eric – you’re exactly right, but please remember, the pencil was bad enough, and now a screw driver too? Of course, come to think about it, as close as I am to our nation’s Capitol, perhaps the screw driver is more fitting!
While the choir may agree with you, how do we convince the public those big name Home listing sites don’t get the job done? Look forward to the follow-ons.
June 12, 2008 — 5:30 am
Cheryl Johnson says:
One practical solution would be to completely ditch the “community” name searches in favor of zip code/map coordinates …. But I doubt if any national listing bots are listening to me. 🙂
June 12, 2008 — 6:14 am
Eric Blackwell says:
@Jim- step 1 raise awareness…check 😉
@Cheryl- That is one way of doing it. Another might be to pull a radius search around metro names (when someone types in Sacramento, they usually want Elk Grove, Carmichael,etc)…
Best to both of you!
Eric
June 12, 2008 — 6:23 am
Gary Frimann says:
You’re right on all accounts, including “La Grange” is a very, very cool song by ZZ Top! I used to play that song before I took a final in college back in the mid-70’s…just to get pumped up.
June 12, 2008 — 6:55 am
Ines says:
Can I say we have been “blackwelled” ? 🙂
Search methods can be so controversial because every city is so different. In Miami for example, we have tons of smaller subdivisions with their own cities, but under the big “Miami” umbrella. Not an easy one to solve – but the radius search may do the trick although you will have people complaining that a listing was included right outside a subdivision they were not interested in.
June 12, 2008 — 10:36 am
Real Estate Raj says:
Ines- You’re right on it. The issues that the programmers are dealing with revolve around the diversity of the different cities and how they are laid out. The next step is will be a intuitive search that can be customized to meet the searches criteria
June 12, 2008 — 11:21 am
Trace says:
Let’s not forget that Realtor.com can’t even keep the Realtor.com blog up without incident(talk.realtor.com). Since I first broke the story about them being hacked, the once daily posts have stopped and they have refused to acknowledge the compromise. If they can’t even keep a blog up and going, the issues Eric writes about are worlds away from their current abilities to fix…..
June 12, 2008 — 11:22 am
Teri L says:
>Can I say we have been “blackwelled” ?
Well said, Ines!! 😀
It’s a conundrum. It’s also a moving target as consumers get smarter about searching online the rules would change. But if we are paying for this, then the bots better get better.
Looking forward to the series, Eric.
(LaGrange rocks. A-ha-ha-ha-haw)
June 12, 2008 — 12:29 pm
Dave Phillips says:
The process of aggregating data from across the nation is daunting if not impossible. When R.com was originally developed, some of us tried to get them to set it up as a link to our local sites. Of course, back then every locale did not have a site. Google base is the closest thing to working, but even that is problematic. Mapping is not good either (yet) because many properties (mayber 20%) are not mapped. New construction is a particular issue with mapping.
This issue is just one of the ones that should make us all realize that a national MLS is a pipe dream. Even if we can get RETS standards right, we can’t get each local area to agree on what to call a neighborhood or a city.
June 12, 2008 — 2:29 pm
Benjamin Dona says:
Well done as usual Eric!
Not a new listing goes by that I don’t have to explain some part of this scenario to my sellers who have bought into the idea that these types of sites are what is going to sell their homes.
June 12, 2008 — 2:53 pm
Ken Smith in Chicago says:
Don’t get me wrong there is room for improvement in teh way real estate agents provide listing data to the public, but sites like R.com, Trulia, Zillow and so forth are not the answer. They are all playing on agents emotions and cheapness hoping that real estate agents never realize the truth.
The truth is that the .com’s (realtor, trulia, zillow, ext) of the world need us and our listings, the public and the agents don’t need the .com’s. They add zero real value to the transaction, they add zero effective marketing for your listings, they have no purpose other then to try and earn an income from your listings.
Real estate is local and no national site can achieve what a good local search will offer.
Think I am wrong, what would happen if every real estate agent pulled all listings from these sites? The public would go and find a local MLS search that actually had ALL the CURRENT listing data and they would be better served. Public wins, agents win, and the .coms go by the wayside.
The agent population needs to wake up and realize we control the future of what our business looks like.
June 12, 2008 — 3:42 pm
Eric Blackwell says:
@Teri and Ines – too funny! And yes, it is a conundrum, but I think much of the answer may well be that we do not NEED a national MLS. (more on that soon–still doing some thinking / research). I think national MLS sites may well in the end, serve the site creator MUCH more than the consumer OR the REALTOR.
@Ben- Thanks.
@David Phillips- a big amen to the following:
“This issue is just one of the ones that should make us all realize that a national MLS is a pipe dream. Even if we can get RETS standards right, we can’t get each local area to agree on what to call a neighborhood or a city.”
June 12, 2008 — 4:02 pm
Rick Belben says:
Your right about the fact that with out OUR listings these sites would not even exist. I am not saying there searches are good but they do get traffic. I think we are a long way off from any perfect solution.
June 12, 2008 — 4:04 pm
Bob says:
I am playing with a search technology that is different than what I have seen anywhere in the online real estate space. Imagine searching first by county. What you would then get is a side screen of all possible search parameters and the number of results in () for each parameter. So if I start with San Diego County, I would get the total number of listings and then a list of ways to drill down like zip codes, communities, etc.
If I picked a sub cat like zip codes, I then get all my options and the number of properties by zip. If I added another parameter like view, the numbers would change again. If I distilled it down to ocean view, then I would have all communities and zip codes that had results with ocean views.
It can parse remarks, so I can search for “fixer” county wide and narrow from there.
You have to see it in action to fully appreciate it, but the first national site to adopt it and have the majority of listings won’t suck. It will win the majority of the eyeballs of the consumer hands down.
June 12, 2008 — 4:32 pm
Thomas Johnson says:
Eric: All the more reason to ditch the subscriber fees and focus on Zestifarming and other long tail activities which put us as the local expert in the neighborhood once they find it.
By the way did you know that La Grange http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQs1m5imLxg is not very far from ERAHouston which is the best place in America to live and work? (haw haw haw-have mercy)
http://agent21.featuredblog.com/?p=23
June 12, 2008 — 8:22 pm
Lane Bailey says:
Great post, and a subject close to my heart. Being in the ‘burbs of Atlanta, I can certainly identify. Gwinnett County, where i am has a bigger population than the city of Atlanta… and there are a several other locales that do as well… but nobody calls up looking for Gwinnett, or Cobb, etc.
Of course, we also have 100,000 listings in out metro area, so a broad search would be insane.
June 12, 2008 — 8:30 pm
Malok says:
Excellent points, Eric. This is actually one of the points I go over during listing presentations for all the persons that have non-main city mailing addresses.
June 13, 2008 — 4:02 am
NRobertson says:
This would be the exact reason we are #1 for Lexington KY Real Estate when we are in Richmond, buyers start out looking for Lexington and see that the best deals are sometime in Richmond.
October 8, 2008 — 6:12 am
San Diego Real Estate Central says:
I have found a alternate way of providing great search functionality by providing an advance search form beyond the bed, bath, and price variables that most search by. This allows a visitor to narrow the scope down to all the fields that are available on the MLS property page, so if they are interested in a house at a certain price that has sewer with a certain size lot they can search by those variables. As well, another great way to provide proper search is by offering a real time statistics page that allows you to search by city then by number of beds required which then indicates all the properties and what the high low average and medium price properties area available based on that information with click through functionality to see those properties.
November 4, 2008 — 2:49 pm
Kevin Tomlinson-Miami Beach Real Estate says:
Not to “rag” on R.com, since it is “our” site –there should have been desire to do the right thing–want to perform for the people who “own” the site.
They also should have known what Trulia did BEFORE Trulia.
December 1, 2008 — 8:06 pm
Laurie Manny says:
Today I called my local MLS to inquire about acquiring RETS access. I was informed that RETS raw data feeds were only being issued to the Broker of Record, that agents could acquire the feeds through their Brokers feeds.
Lets see just how many things I can find wrong with that set up.
I will never let any broker anywhere near my feeds, IDX, lead generation tools or my site.
Geez agents who don’t research this stuff are just going to get screwed. Most probably won’t even realize it.
December 3, 2008 — 2:00 am
Eric Blackwell says:
@laurie-
Each MLS has their own game plan with this stuff…it would behoove agents to stay on top of it and get vocal where needed.
Eric
December 3, 2008 — 6:28 am