Search for Real Estate

I'm going to assume that it's the multi-million dollar advertising budgets of certain third party websites that have created a completely new advertising business that is real estate related.

It's the push (in my opinion) for real estate consumers to search for homes online before searching for a real estate agent.

Like any special interest, advertise it enough and it becomes something that becomes a normal practice. Savvy third party real estate advertising sites know this and obviously are not going to advertise the best way to find real estate except to visit their site in which they can collect your information and resell it to real estate agents, refer it to real estate agents for a fee, or sell real estate advertising space based on a cost of how many people visit their site.

Realtor.com may have been one of the first services that did this. They had the best of both worlds -- not only did they get to charge service providers to advertise on their site, they also got to charge REALTORS for enhancing their listings, featured home advertising, banner ads and featured CMA services. (As a REALTOR, if you wanted one of these slots, all you had to do was pay the fee which was normally associated with the amount of activity for a zip code.... no experience required.) All this, and Realtor.com got to put a ton of listings on their website for users to view. Come to our site to view their listings so we can charge them more was basically the business plan that I picked up out of it.

Homegain is another online pioneer and from what I remember were the first ones to practice the referring of information to real estate agents for a fee and they have multiple services for real estate agents as evidenced here --->  http://www.homegain.com/agent/realestateagent.  Once again, the only qualifications for a real estate agent to start receiving your leads is to purchase or subscribe to the service. I actually used this service for a short time long ago when I was a new real estate agent... in fact I subscribed for a zip code I really did not know that much about and sure enough, I received leads from people who thought that the top agents were competing for them.

Homevalues.com and Justlisted.com work on a similar basis. A real estate agent Purchases a zip code for exclusive leads and the consumer fills out their information and then waits for the paying agent to contact them with the results. According to what I know about the service, you don't know what real estate agent is getting your information. They'll just contact you back with the results when they get your information. I'm also going to assume I can purchase a zip code that I know nothing about if it is available. (I never actually used this service but out of curiosity I did inquire about it at one time when the TV commercials first came out for a popular zip code that was quoted to me at over $400 a month.)

These have been very profitable revenue generators for their operators and in all fairness there have been several real estate agents that have benefited from these services which has resulted in a slew of new services. Many of these services may have modified their business plan in one form or another but it's basically all based on the same concept as evidenced in their advertising.

View homes online, Search the MLS, Get your homes value....Fill out your information and a real estate agent will contact you shortly. Many of them have gotten savvy enough to feed public information into their programs to spit out a list of homes that have recently sold in the area inquired about. Of course, normally there are disclaimers that state for a more accurate analysis, please consult a local real estate agent.... (like the ones advertising on our site.)

Also from my experience of actually representing buyers and sellers in well over a hundred real estate transactions, I've come across one or two agents that had admittedly picked up their buyer or seller from using one of the services above and they both had something in common: They had less experience then the average real estate agent. I can't speak about all real estate agents that pay for these services.. just the ones that I have personally come across in my experience.

But... I will say this. We've relocated clients to other areas of the country and have had real estate agents refer their relocation clients to us. The last thing we do when we research a real estate agent for our valuable clients is go to the above services to find an agent. I really don't see the benefit for somebody blindly filling out their information for an agent they know nothing about.

We have our criteria for finding real estate agents in other parts of the country, but before I write about it I would like to hear from other real estate agents on what they look for when they have a client or friend relocating to another part of the country.

Real Estate agents: Would you use one of the services mentioned above if you were purchasing or selling real estate in another part of the country in a state you are not licensed in?

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