Anyone have experience with submitting their listings to Trulia via XML feed?

Any drawbacks to submitting and having listings on Trulia? I know there's a lot of talk about Zillow and Zestimates - any problems like this with Trulia?

Would like to hear from agents/brokers that have personal experience submitting a feed to Trulia, if there are any posting here.

Thanks!

My point2agent site feeds to Trulia. I have not noticed any traffic coming from it though. They have syndicated there for a good while now. I question whether the general public uses it that much.

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Cal
Orange Beach Condos | Gulf Shores Condos | Keller Williams Gulf States

The Gulfshoreslife.com Team serves the Baldwin County Alabama Real Estate market from The Eastern Shore of Mobile Bay to the Southern Shores of the Alabama Gulf Coast: Orange Beach, Gulf Shores, Fort Morgan, Point Clear, Fairhope, Montrose, Daphne, Spanish Fort, AL. Referals are welcomed. For more information on AL Gulf Coast Real Estate, please contact me or visit our website.

Sarasota Association of Realtors

That's another service I am considering. Are you happy with it? Perhaps it's better to cover more sites with point2's listing syndication than to have to submit to all of them myself!

I'm not really familiar with them yet but do they charge for the syndication service?

You must be a paying subscriber to get the syndication I think. I like it and they are great to work with and have cool tools. I kind of look at some RE sites as High School, Point2 as College and REW as Advanced Degree Program. Point2 will do all a new agent needs and all an old agent needs, but REW in my opinion is really great for those that have tweaked other apps and want more (and the REW clients probably generally know what they want).

Not that REW is a bad place for a beginner, just most beginners don't have the capital to invest or experience to dictate their knowing what they want. I spent my time in College and am excited to finally be entering my advanced degree program thanks to REW.

Stick around hicrc! By the way you or your company has a very nice site.

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Cal
Orange Beach Condos | Gulf Shores Condos | Keller Williams Gulf States

The Gulfshoreslife.com Team serves the Baldwin County Alabama Real Estate market from The Eastern Shore of Mobile Bay to the Southern Shores of the Alabama Gulf Coast: Orange Beach, Gulf Shores, Fort Morgan, Point Clear, Fairhope, Montrose, Daphne, Spanish Fort, AL. Referals are welcomed. For more information on AL Gulf Coast Real Estate, please contact me or visit our website.

Sarasota Association of Realtors

Excuse my ignorance about all of this but why do you make these distinctions, specifically? I'm on a sharp, sharp learning curve and appreciate all you can share, believe me.

Thanks very much!

Point2 is a great product that is ready to go and functional as is.

It can also be customized extensively (by you or someone you hire), but remains a template site and you are limited on what your customizations can be (i.e you can have a framed in IDX solution, but you can't have your own MLS solution hosted within your own domain and an integral part of your site).

With the REW custom sites, they can be pretty much whatever you want it to be with all the bells and whistles you can imagine if you can convey to the programmers and designers an idea of what it is you want. The catch is that nothing is free and when design hours are paid for by an individual instead of split amongst 10's of thousands of users the costs can be substantial. You better know what you want, how you are going to use it, and follow up to recover your investment and profit from it.

The point I was trying to make is that when putting tools in your tool box a beginner may find a crescent wrench sufficient, where someone with more experience and specialization may need a metric box end wrench with an angled handle. I hope that made sense.

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Cal
Orange Beach Condos | Gulf Shores Condos | Keller Williams Gulf States

The Gulfshoreslife.com Team serves the Baldwin County Alabama Real Estate market from The Eastern Shore of Mobile Bay to the Southern Shores of the Alabama Gulf Coast: Orange Beach, Gulf Shores, Fort Morgan, Point Clear, Fairhope, Montrose, Daphne, Spanish Fort, AL. Referals are welcomed. For more information on AL Gulf Coast Real Estate, please contact me or visit our website.

Sarasota Association of Realtors

On trulia.com you have to submit a xml format - they have very good docs on it and also examples on how it should look. They also have a tool to check if your xml is well formated - the tool just checks if the xml is well formated, meaning if all tags are closed, you don't have any characters which are not supported. But it doesn't check to make sure if you have all the needed tags, if the info from them is supported(most of the tags have options which you have to choose from - like status of listing, type of home). They say that the average time to show up is 72 hours after you submit a feed, but usually takes much longer. Also, after you submit a feed, you don't get any messages saying if the feed was approved. You just have to wait to see if your homes show up, if it doesn't you have to check your feed again to see where's the mistake on it. On this part, you don't have any support from trulia.com, you just have to make changes on it and re-submit it.
You can also submit to google base - i don't know how much is used by people, but most changes are google uses it on it's searches.
Also, you can submit to craig's list, it seems it's very popular in some areas

Why give trulia your listings? They do not provide any measurable amount of traffic (It has been tested by multiple agents I know) and all you are doing is providing content to your competition.
Content=rankings=more traffic=more they will charge for premium exposure. Trulia provides NO value to the real estate industry yet agents think they are getting a free lunch. I think we are all smart enough to know there is no such thing.

Customers do not YET demand that you put their listings on Trulia and at that they have no idea what T is. If you help T grow they will become a household name and people will expect to be listed there and more important will expect the enhanced listing which you have to pay for. T will continue to raise the price for this service the more demand they have and will end up being as expensive as R.com.

I have been told I am wrong about T more then a few times, starting when I kept saying they would start charging agents for premium placement...guess what that has already started. The prices will just continue to rise. They didn't invest millions of dollars to launch this site to make $50 here and there from agents, they want hundreds from average agents and thousands from big producers.

BTW, here is some great related reading "BOHICA…and this time it is Trulia"

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My thoughts on the Sarasota Association of REALTORS actions.

Well said Ken. We as agents and brokers don't need to shoot ourselves in the foot by helping Trulia grow and compete against us.

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Mike Taylor
Indianapolis Real Estate | Carmel Real Estate |My REW Blog

Good post Ken!

__________________
Cal
Orange Beach Condos | Gulf Shores Condos | Keller Williams Gulf States

The Gulfshoreslife.com Team serves the Baldwin County Alabama Real Estate market from The Eastern Shore of Mobile Bay to the Southern Shores of the Alabama Gulf Coast: Orange Beach, Gulf Shores, Fort Morgan, Point Clear, Fairhope, Montrose, Daphne, Spanish Fort, AL. Referals are welcomed. For more information on AL Gulf Coast Real Estate, please contact me or visit our website.

Sarasota Association of Realtors