Google and Trulia married now

[Lydia]

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...rtnership.html

Well, it looks like G is getting in the Real Estate Listings arena. Certainly can not be good.

[Saodavi]

Might be good if you're with C-32, CB or ERA. But yeah, I'm not liking it.

[drewnick]

Is it ALL Trulia listings or just Realogy's?

[seoai]

I don't feel so good

[webmaster]

Yikes! I mean woohoo! I mean.... I don't know yet, but very big news

[OCTeam]

Prudential has embrassed Trulia as well and their listings are starting to appear atop the G long tail searches. Oh, agents are told it's great news for them to have their listing there...first they set up an inhouse e-team to work the company leads, then made a deal with Y to be at the top of the city search pages, then property signs to drive traffic to the Pru site, now Trulia..sure sounds like great news for agents who invest in technology. Just companies competing with their own agents.

[Eric Blackwell]

First off, it is big news...

I could make the case, that we have fed the hand that bites us and now we MAY be starting to feel the teeth of it.

I am not sure whether to be happy or sad, but watching it play out will be interesting. We do know for sure that the folks at G! see the value of the real estate related traffic and are looking to profit from it. (More than they already are from AdWords)...We also know for sure that some of the major franchises in the game will try to use their advertising strength to find ways to advertsie (read: getting listings displayed online).

I could make the case that OC is right about franchise systems competing with their own agents...

Since I am down at the RE/MAX convention right now I will probe that one with some friends in high places and let you know what they think...We had some interesting conversations last night (which is why I have been posting less lately) and I wish I'd have read this before going so that I could have asked some more about it.

Best;

Eric

[sarahk]

I'm amazed Google would team up with an outfit that is focussed on a single country. Does that mean Trulia will be going global or does it mean Google has given up and is returning to it's US roots?

[sdhomes]

Google Base had a problem. When they first started, they assumed it would be similar to the car business. Bubba Joe's Chevy would upload their Chevy inventory and Billy Bob Ford would upload their Ford inventory. They assumed that Bubba Joe and Billy Bob would never upload anything other than their own inventory.

Then they got into the real estate biz and things got weird. An agent in San Diego feed his IDX feed to GBase. All of a sudden, this agent's info is on 15k property listings in GBase. In addition to those listings, they had Best Image uploading their clients listings, along with several that DIDNT belong to the agent. With some agents having multiple vendors uploading listings, plus some brokers uploading the entire office inventory, the dupe content was huge.

Trulia had the same problem when they first started. They used to crawl agent sites looking for an agents listing inventory. They hit a couple sites where the IDX listings were crawlable and I found my listings on Trulia with another agent's info. One call and I got an engineer who didnt realize the problem. They didn't want inaccurate info and fixed the problem very quickly.

I spoke with Gbase engineers in August during SES and they were not even aware of the issue. They called after SES to get more examples and suggestions. What initially came from that was the mandate to vendors that they could only upload listings of their clients. As brokers started to cut deals with Trulia and GBase directly, it made sense for GBase to try and get as few feeds as possible with the greatest amount of listings, without dupes. Dealing with brokers via an aggregator like Trulia makes sense for Google and the big brokers are signing off as well.

This is where the plug comes in. Some companies will exploit this as Pru is doing, to capture the lead and compete directly with their own agents, while others like KW intend to make sure the agent is still the point of contact.

Whether its good for the agent depends on who you work with and how they choose to treat the agent. Either way, its good for the consumer. The trick is lining up you (the agent), with the broker and the client/consumer.

[Anthony]

Eric, I wish I could be a fly on the wall and hear what your friends at ReMax said at the RE/MAX convention about Realogy uploading over 500,000 of their properties to Google Base directly.

At the time of this post there are 180,046 listings for “RE/MAX” on Google Base nationwide. I really hope the link works

62,167 Of those listings were uploaded by one site. This site does not link to any RE/Max site nor does it mention the agents name. (this site has a total of 714,490 properties uploaded to Google Base)

25,662 Were uploaded by a Free magazine. This site does not link to any RE/Max site from the landing page but does mention the Agents name and photo. (this Free magazine has a total of 211,366 properties uploaded to Google Base)

34,890 Were uploaded (many duplicates) by another Free magazine. This site does not link to any RE/Max site from the landing page but does mention the Agents name and photo.(this Free magazine has a total of 379,861 properties uploaded to Google Base )