Zillow, Trulia, Oodle.... Oh My!

In our quest of keeping up with what is going on in the Residential real estate world and staying in tune with trends effecting the online residential real estate side of our business, we've come across several issues that effect not only residential real estate agents, but also the consumer.

Last year it was Zillow and the Zestimate.  Trust us, we had to more then once explain this system to several clients concerning the valuation of their homes... obviously much easier to do when the Zestimate was lower for a homeseller then when the Zestimate was higher then our valuation of a clients home.  We can tell you this... not once was the Zestimate close enough to use it as a price valuation in putting a home up for sale... our experience.  The absolute worst case experience was on a clients home that had a Zestimate that was $130,000 below the true market value. 

Once again, this was our experience and maybe somebody out there could come up with an experience where they were closer to the true value of a home.  We sold a lot of homes in 2006 and not one of them came close to this service.

This year, the uproar seems to be Trulia....who overtook Zillow as the favorite place to be for lost consumers who from what we've been able to see is attempting to provide some pretty cool tools for consumers to view.  In actuality, the information provided is pretty generic but the concept is genius to say the least.  The founders, Stanford MBA's who graduated in 2004 have absolutely no background in real estate from what we've been able to find and their funding is provided by an "angel source" which is a private funder.  Their concept in what they are doing is absolutely genius since they are offering cool tools to put on agents websites in order to build links back to their main site.... which builds their website rankings in major metropolitan areas.  Currently, their business plan according to their blog is based on paid advertising and many major brokerages have been suckered in to provide MLS listings for free.  Let's face it, without listings, the site is basically worthless.  No homes to view.... consumer moves on. 

The big question for any real estate brokerage that has a clue is:  Once Trulia dominates the search engine rankings will they sell the positions for major advertising dollars?  More then likely in our opinion... yes. 

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