Someone has to say it. It's like the elephant in the room. Everyone, including most of you other real estate agents out there don't seem to get it. Trulia and these other third party real estate home search sites are the worst thing that can possibly happen - to consumers. No, this is ot a rant about me or other real estate professionals around the country and it does seem that I have sparked a nerve when talking about this with people and I think it truly deserves some more conversation. Why in the world would we want to list our homes on a site like Trulia? Don't even start to say that we need it because we don't. What we need is for the NAR to wake up and fix realtor.com. Let me explain to you why this is bad for us, as REALTORS, and how this is ultimately bad for consumers. Let me also preface this by saying this: Do a search for
Atlanta Real Estate on my website. Wait I did it for you. There are currently 13,942 homes for sale under the name Atlanta in the home search provided for free on my website. Now, go search Atlanta homes for sale on Trulia. No don't, I did that for you too. There are 6,735 homes for sale in Atlanta on Trulia. Less than half. So, before I go any further with this - How can you reasonably expect to find the best home? I'm not nearly finished here and it only goes down hill from here for these third party listing services. Do you think those listings are up to date on Trulia like they are on my website and the website of other REALTORS around the country? They are not and they will never be. REALTORS and brokers who provide home search on their website get nightly updates to all of the listings. Trulia and the others can not do that for you. Therefore they have less information to compile their cool and nifty data tools from and less accurate information to begin with so they are not reliable. Did you also know that these companies are already charging companies and brokers to list homes for sale on their website. Let me be clear about this here. They charge me so I can list my home on their website with enormous amounts of innaccurate data so that they can give that back to consumers. Who wins here? Not the consumer. Not me. Only the third party vendors. This will ultimately hurt the consumer most as we have to spend money to list homes for sale on rediculous, non relevant websites like these. Those costs eventually get passed on to consumers. So real estate agents everywhere, it is time for you to wake up. Because the friendly hand that is claiming to help you is already starting to bite you. The only people who make them relevant are people who feed them their listings instead of educating their clients about better ways to market homes for sale. If you are a consumer who happens to come across this, I hope you tell everyone you know about this. If you are a REALTOR who thinks they are good for the industry, I would love to here your opinions too.
