This week two MLSs said they would no longer allows their agents to use Diverse Solutions IDX products because they were now affiliated with Zillow. MetroList, Denver’s MLS, and the Santa Barbara Association of Realtors MLS.

Why? Because people at the MLSs didn’t like that Diverse sold their company to Zillow.

“The (Diverse Solutions IDX) product is actually a fine product, it’s just that they sold to Zillow,” said Laurel Abbott, the association’s president-elect and a board member. Abbott is also chair of the association’s multiple listing service committee.

This is no different than the government saying “we’re not going to allow you to buy any products from China anymore because we philosophically disagree with how they run their government.” A whole lot of really great products would go away overnight. That iPad you have? Gone. The Mac computer? Your TV and probably half the items in your house – you can no longer own, because an arbitrary body got into a fight with some other body. Instead of working out their differences… They just reacted.

MLS executives – Do you realize what you’re doing here? You’re playing God with people’s lives? Agents have spend countless hours investing in their websites. They’ve set up clients on email drips of properties, they’ve built pages to attract buyers, they’ve built advertising campaigns around their IDX. The IDX is the lifeblood of their marketing platform – and you’re giving them a month, during their busiest season to change this, potentially costing them thousands.

And now, you’ve told them they can’t use it anymore because you don’t like their parent company’s business model.

“Zillow is not a friend to organized real estate, so we’ve voted not to support (the company). There were concerns of misuse of our data. (The Zillow website) is grossly inaccurate. (The site overinflates) what our (for-sale) numbers are (and) includes information from properties that have sold months ago. It’s not an accurate site,” Ms. Abbott goes onto say…

If you understand the difference between syndication and IDX, how could you possibly make this statement? How could you claim that anything with syndication changes how IDX works? Two different databases. Two different data sources. Two different sets of rules that have to be followed by each business.

I urge Realtors to speak to their MLSs and make sure this isn’t a power play by either MLS executives or instead from agnets on boards of the MLSs whom are scared of other agents using these products.

Marketing Director for MetroList, Melissa Olson says the following about their issue with Diverse Solutions:

In Colorado, Olson said that they have a “local favorite” in IDX provider Hillside Software. More than 200 real estate companies are using Hillside’s product, with Olson saying it has a number of unique features.

Should MLSs have a “local favorite” IDX vendor? I think not. Shouldn’t they allow their members to choose the technologies they want? Isn’t the MLS a member driven organization? Does this statement not ring the DOJ “Antitrust” bells?

Quotes on this page taken directly from Inman News and from GeekWire

However, for 24 hours TribusGroup.com is participating in the anti-SOPA campaign. As you may have seen some of our text etc is blocked out to show what the web may be like in a time if SOPA or PIPA pass our Congress. Not because we’re “jumping on the bandwagon,” but instead because we feel this could cause real harm to the real estate ecosystem.

I thought I would do my best to explain what this could mean for Realtors out there.

First of all, in our business everyday, we deal with copyrighted content. Consider that everyday you share property flyers with your agents and clients. The photos and the information about that listing are copyrighted. (Did you know that technically the brokerage with the listing owns that information?)
What if however, the brokerage that posted those photos, DIDN’T actually own them? What if the professional photographer that had been sent in to take them wasn’t paid correctly and so he didn’t agree to release his copyright on the photos but the agent has them? Now you’re handing out materials you don’t own the copyright to.

Under SOPA / PIPA theoretically they could file a complaint with the goverment, and have your entire site shut down! Yes – for one photo on one listing, your entire site could be filtered right off the Internet. No more SEO – No more leads – No more branding. For one photo, out of the 100,000 listings your MLS may have with 5 photos each. 1/500,000 – yes. There’s a good chance one photo is in violation. However, again they could demand that all sites with that infringing content be taken off the accessible Internet! All because someone just didn’t know.

How many online videos do you or your agents watch in the office? Each time you watch something (yes WATCH IT, not even host it on your server) that has a copyright on it, there is a penalty of up to 5 years in jail. In addition, Internet Service Providers have the option of proactively blocking sites they think might be infringing around the Internet. If they do they can protect themselves of their own liability for helping to stream this content. Suddenly, you have staffers at ISPs running around blocking any site they want claiming a SOPA / PIPA violation! What kind of Internet does that leave us with?

Brokers, what if one of your agents posted a quote on their company agent roster page that was copyrighted? Your entire site could be taken off of the accessible Internet. Did you know for example that the entire text of the “I Have A Dream” speech from Martin Luther King, JR. is copyrighted? When your agents posted clips of this on Monday on their websites, Facebook profiles, anywhere… wherever that is posted, the entire domain can be removed from the Internet. Poof.

SOPA / PIPA is big brother in every way.

1984 may not have been like 1984, but 2012 could be like it if these bills are allowed to go through.

We encourage you to contact your representatives and let them know how strongly you feel about this bill.
Visit this site and fill in your address to send an email to your Congress representatives.

Own Your Content

I hear this push for using auto posting tools, and any other tools where your content is tossed about the Internet. Unfortunately, I believe it to be terrible advice. And that comes from someone who 3 years ago was one of the first people to embrace the benefits of Posterous for real estate. Sure it’s easy, you post it one place, and it magically goes everywhere. Only problem is it’s simply not the same thing as doing it the right way. Below you’ll see my unfiltered email back to the client about why autoposting tools are not the way to go.

1) The issue I was primarily referring to was Edgerank, Facebook’s ranking algorithm to decide what you see in your newsfeed, which is not necessarily the same thing as SEO. When you share something on Facebook, each item is given a score relative to each person that could potentially see it. It’s based on a lot of different factors, such as how often you’ve commented back and forth with the person, how often you are tagged in photos together, if you’ve poked each other etc. But most importantly for this discussion, it takes into account how the content was shared. If you share through a sharing service like Posterous, Ping.FM, NetworkedBlogs, etc. Facebook knows you didn’t physically click the button to share it on Facebook and that it used the Facebook Connect system to send it the data. It considers this content to be autoposted to their site and that automatically gives is a lower EdgeRank score. It is immediately lower ranked and has a much lower propensity to show up on people’s walls. One study found that your post was 650% more likely to be viewed and ranked prominently if you manually share it as opposed to autoshare.

2) There is a HUGE difference about posting to Posterous or any other site vs. posting to your own site. You own your content on your site. You do NOT own your content on other sites. If Posterous went out of business tomorrow what would you do? Where would your links go? All of the traffic that Google would be generating you would be gone in a flash.

Furthermore, when you post a link on Facebook manually back to your own site, if someone likes the content and wants to read more if it’s an article for example, or if it’s a photo perhaps they want to see a larger version etc, but when they click the link when shared from Posterous it takes them to…. Posterous. When you click the link on something you originally share on your own site and manually post it to Facebook, it sends them back to your site, where they can then engage with your other content and you can pick up that person as a lead perhaps. I see this regularly, someone sees an interesting article on their community, they click to one of our brokerages pages, then next to it is real estate search, they get into searching and suddenly the broker has a lead they can work with that person together on and proactively market to them with information about the community they are interested in…

3) Google does by definition segregate content between your own site and your Posterous page. When Google indexes a site, part of the ranking that they give you is around the entirety of content on your site. When you share things on your page, they are indexed on your page. When you share things on Posterous to push out to Facebook. The content lives on Posterous, and therefore when Google indexes the content it’s going to show the Posterous page instead of your website. The more content you can have on your site that is relevant and recent about your topics the higher you will rank for harder to reach search terms like Homes in Los Angeles. When you spread your content all around, you’re unfocused strategy will hurt your long term SEO efforts.

Today is a different age.

The downtick in the economy and market has made everyone more cautious. They now spend countless hours researching homes before they contact an agent. The client, in many cases, unfortunately, knows more about market conditions in a neighborhood or subdivision than an agent does. They’ve visited sites like Zillow and have gotten down to finding out information about living in neighborhoods, potential increases (or decreases) in value they can expect over the next 1, 3, and 5 years. They’ve compared short term time owning a home with renting. They’ve considered staying put in their house because the value might be a whole lot worse than they thought.

The problem is, that data isn’t always accurate when it comes from outside sources. Zillow, admittedly, does mark on a page, albeit deep within their website, that they have data inaccuracies.

The thing is, clients crave data, and it’s up to us as Realtors to provide better data.

I’m currently sitting here in the lobby of the Hilton, San Francisco, anxiously awaiting the begining of the first ever Inman Data Summit. Instead of a general focus on real estate, the summit focuses on the key areas of information within the process of transacting real estate. I’m excited because we’re here to discuss better data, more responsible use of data, and great new products that could be made if data was more freely distributed within our industry. The question I pose is two fold, why in a data related industry are there so few events catering to this? And why is it that the attendees of these events are almost all vendors. Why do I not see on the list more brokerages and agents?

At Tribus, we think providing up to date market data on your site is one of the three most important things you can do. Instead of clients getting potentially very wrong data on sites like Zillow, etc. Why aren’t you providing that information?

Take a look of an example of the kind of data we can offer clients: Oklahoma City Real Estate Market Stats

Let’s make agents and brokerages the provider of up to date information. Be a resource that clients are looking for, and provide them a reason to believe and trust in you as a professional.

On the table were some really big issues franchise IDX and the all important Realtor Party Political Survival Initiative or RPPSI.  A few of my friends were able to be there and cover it live.  Here’s a (slightly out of order) stream of what happened:

UPDATE: Rob Hahn put together his own update on his Zillow Sponsored 7ds Associates Blog

White Hat SEO

If you’re the kind of person that likes to play by all of the rules, 100% of the time, white hat SEO is for you.  Practicing white hat SEO means that you stick to what’s proven over the long run, what Google, Bing, and Yahoo / Microsoft have suggested as best practices for getting your site to rank in their search engines.  Most of you know that the number and quality of inbound links to your site is one of the biggest items as far as increasing your placement in Google.  A true white hat SEO only does this through putting out good content and hoping that people naturally link back to your site.

Furthermore, tt means using configuring the smallest details on your site that can make a big difference, H1 H2 and H3 tags, ALT tags on images and links, good quality URL structures / permalinks.  Furthermore, it means setting up unique information by page for the titles and descriptions of the pages.  It means following the Top 10 List of SEO items for Realtors (but it carries over into everyone).

Grey Hat SEO

Grey Hat following search engine optimizers focus their time on all of the items above but in addition to that they try to push the envelope.  They try new methods of getting their sites to rank.  For example, they build server networks from 6 different web hosts and put sites that link to each other on those various web hosts (Hint: Google doesn’t count links generally if they are on the same hosting account, or if it can tell the two sites are owned by the same person.  Think: when you registered your sites did you use the same name at GoDaddy for all of them?  The same address?  Are they on the same hosting account (if not do they have different C-level IP addresses?) If so Google probably discounts any of your links back and forth to each other. )

These are the people right now that are out aggressively learning how social media links affect search rankings.  They want to push the envelope.  Some of the things they do turn out to work well, others do not, but they learned something and were out willing to figure things out.  They often don’t get banned from Google, but they find that of the tools in their arsenal certain methods just stop working after a while.

Black Hat SEO

These are the nefarious type.  The type that site at home doing nothing but learning the ins and outs of how Google ranks sites and purposely try to find the loopholes.  They look for every advantage they can get.  They hear that little voice in their head saying this is probably wrong, but they laugh and suggest it’s Google’s fault for not fixing their error.

They build  30 sites that link to each other… .  They pay people to put links to their sites, they flood social media with links to get ranked higher, they build content farms of sites that just aggregate data from numerous other sites (have you ever had your content stolen and placed on another site, it was either a black hat SEO or someone looking to get ad revenue selling your content).  But in the end their methods either work amazingly well, or they get banned after a period of time.  Black Hats are constantly chasing what will be the next big thing to get added.  But they are forced to constantly defend their sites against the Google Slap, meaning their site is banned from Google for a long period of time maybe 6 months.

Keep in mind that even large organizations like JC Penney have been found to be employing black hat SEO methods to get their sites to rank.  In the end it really comes down to what you are looking for.  Do you want a high risk, potentially high reward?  Do you want to play it 100% safe and work over the long run? Or try something somewhat in between where you toe up to the line of what is ok but don’t cross over?

Subdomains

Each of these were known as a subdomain.  A subdomain is what comes before the first period in your site.  SUBDOMAIN.yoursite.com  It was a way to have different content in different places.

Many times I see this used for real estate sites to separate portions of the site.  For example, realestatesearch.yoursite.com or an agents page on a real estate brokerage site such as ericstegemann.yoursite.com

The important thing to understand is that each of these Google considers different from the main domain.  So ericstegemann.yoursite.com is not the 100% same thing in Google’s mind as www.yoursite.com or just yoursite.com

Is Your Site Forked?

Therefore, when you build your site, for SEO it’s best if you use all one subdomain or no subdomain at all.  That way Google doesn’t go through a process we call Forking your site. Much like a fork in a road, forking your site means that Google has decided to index some of the pages on your site using the www and some without (and some cases using other subdomains if you have them or even the IP address of your site if you have your own.)  It has to make the decision to go down indexing your content on different paths.

Assuming the content is identically the same on your www as no www, site forking is bad for many reasons.  First of all your search engine optimization is based around many different factors, but much being how much and what content you have on your site.  If your site is indexed in both ways some of your content will get the credit on the www and some on the non-www.  Google will not index the same information once on each site, it picks one for each, usually based on where it saw the information first.  Therefore splitting up the total value of your site.  In addition, Google probably sees some of your content on the WWW version and the non-www being the same.  So you have duplicate content issues on your sites.

So What Should I Use? The WWW or no WWW

In my observational opinion, more people tend (due to 10 years of being taught to do it this way) to type the www before any site they visit.  Therefore even if they know google.com works, they will still type www.google.com  .  Therefore in our opinion, we ALWAYS use the www when setting up a real estate brokerage or agent website.  The standard should be what most people will use.  But, some will ask, why does it matter ?  Why should you use the WWW just because that’s what people type in?

The answer to that is based around how you set your site to send people from www to no www.

How Can I Fix This?

Many hosting companies allow you to set when you first setup your site whether you want your site to use www or no www, then automatically forward the traffic from one to the other.  One of the hosts we use is Dreamhost, in the setup panel it offers the below option:

Check with your hosting provider to see if they have this option.

How Does Adding The WWW Automatically Work?

You may have heard of a redirect or a 301 redirect being used for a site before.  It’s a process by which when someone visits one site you actually send them somewhere else.  Many Realtors have domains sitting around and they probably just forward them to their main website, this is doing what’s called a 301 redirect.  It’s the process by which your domain that’s being redirected tells the visitors Internet Browser that this page is been permanently redirected somewhere else (the 301 is computer code to say it’s permanent).

So your website host, when selecting an option like above is setting that 301 for you from yoursite.com to www.yoursite.com.  The important thing to know is that when you do a 301 redirect some of the SEO that you have to the page the user originally went to is lost when it bounces to the new site.  Google therefore might visit yoursite.com and see it really needs to go to www.yoursite.com .  If you are using no www, and most people type in www, and the links into your site are with the www, then each time Google goes through there you lose, albeit small, a bit of credit for each of those.  Therefore, using what most people will use, the www, makes every bit of SEO flow to your site.

Recap WWW vs NO WWW

If you have a site make sure you’ve either asked your website provider or host if they have it set to forward from no www. to www.  You can simply test this by visiting both pages of your site in your url bar and see if whatever you typed stays.  Therefore look to see if you type in www.yoursite.com, after it loads does your URL bar still say www.yoursite.com?  Now do the same thing for just yoursite.com, after loading does it now say www.yoursite.com?  If so, it’s setup correctly, if not, please contact your hosting or website vendor.

It seems that this would be a fairly profitable business since Move can sell the Blockshopper ad inventory to the same set of customers it currently has…  One item that’s important to Blockshopper is their hyperlocal nature.

Since Move already sells spots down to a city / zip code level to Realtors with their community spotlight program.  The question is will Move charge extra for this program since they will now appear on BlockShopper, or will Move sell it as a feature to help them provide more value to the Realtors and vendors that buy these local targeted ads?  OR will Move just be a salesforce that sells ads to those interested on behalf of BlockShopper?  Will they not be pushing any of their own current ad inventory purchasers to the service?

If they do begin pushing the BlockShoppper ads, do you see Realtors continuing to want to work with Move?  We’ve heard from numerous agents over the past year that working with the company is a “necessary evil.”

As part of the agreement, Move becomes the exclusive national sales force for all real estate advertisers on BlockShopper and will syndicate Move ad products on BlockShopper.com for agents interested in reaching local buyers and sellers. Agents purchasing community-based ad products on BlockShopper will soon be supported by Moves rapid response Customer Care team that handled over 1.4 million calls in thousands of communities last year.

via Move, Inc. Expands Advertisers Reach Into Hyper-Local Markets With BlockShopper Deal — CAMPBELL, Calif., March 9, 2011 /PRNewswire/ –.

The Background Behind eEdge

According to KW, eEdge was pitched as “the first fully integrated front and back end platform for real estate professionals.”  (An aside: Sorry KW it’s not a product that’s “never been developed by any company, anywhere.” We take a little bit of an issue with that statement since our system has been around since March of 2009 and offers an incredibly similar level of functionality, including a completely integrated system where everything works and talks together for single data entry.)  A better, less hyperbole filled statement about the product would be that it’s the first integrated solution in use company wide by a top 5 franchise firm.  (Actually, according to KW, they are now the number 2 real estate company in the world in terms of agent size with almost 80,000 agents.)  Which, we’ll agree that alone is probably a big statement.  Shockingly, as our blog has discussed before, it’s still amazing that CRM has been around since 1985 or so in computer format, and yet until this time no major company has taken it on.  So first of all congratulations to Keller Williams for taking a first step here.  (I wish Tribus would have been asked to be a part of the bidding process…)  KWRI has made some great steps in the past and their growth in a bad market proves that.  Keller Williams set out to fill in a hole they felt they had in their company.  They wanted to offer what they believed was a competitive point for agents, a lower cost technology package.  So they sought out to build what became eEdge.  They asked their Agent Leadership Council for input and to vote on the product, and each market center voted unanimously to approve moving forward.  They were explained there would be some development costs to begin with and therefore at least the first few months of the payments are going without a full fledged system and therefore being used for building out some of the other functionality of the product.

Overview of eEdge

So what are the main components behind the service:

• There is a $15 / month / agent fee yielding about $1.2million/month or $14,400,000 a year
• CRM (called myLeads and myContacts) – a customer relationship management system using a dumbed down version of MarketLeader’s GrowthLeader system.
• Front End Wesbite – a yourname.kwagent.com site that is now powered by Market Leader with their IDX.
• Transaction Management (called myTransactions) – DotLoop provides transaction / document management and a basic eSign functionality.
• Print Marketing (called myMarketing) – A system allowing agents to send print based marketing to their farms powered by Imprev.

The main idea is that everything will be fully integrated and therefore make an agents life easy.  However there are some issues at play and some questions that we’ve yet to see answered.

First of all, it’s our understanding that Keller Williams is making the electronic document system a completely mandatory item for their agents in the coming days.  Keller Williams uses what they call a green sheet (a document that tells staff how commissions are disbursed, who the relevant parties in the transaction are, etc) to turn in files currently.  These will now HAVE to be done via a computer.  At Tribus, we’re big proponents of moving to a digital world, (and we’re focusing a lot of our development time right now on our open transaction management system) however we’re also pragmatists.  It’s unlikely that in even a 100 person, much less an 80,000 person, organization that everyone will feel comfortable using the product.  I’ve seen many Realtors over the age of 65 who are technologically savvy, however I’ve seen many that aren’t and who do lots of business yet still have no interest in trying.  What will happen with these folks?  Forcing these individuals to use the product, I believe, will cause a huge headache.

Complaints About eEdge

I’ve also taken some extensive time in checking in on agents actually using the system, here are some of the main issues it seems like they are having with the first phase:

1. The system does not connect to anything else most of the other products that agents use.  So if you use other vendors’ products they can’t push leads into eEdge.  ( Except for WolfNet IDX.  Congrats to Rich Bailey and his excellent team over there for securing the deal that allows leads from their system to push into eEdge!  If it’s true that IDX is not included in eEdge basic, it seems like getting their system would be the first phone call I’d make tomorrow!)
2. They can’t send HTML emails out from the system.  So email marketing is text based only.
3. There is no blog and community content can only be outbound links to other pages
4. You can’t upload contacts into the system without them having email addresses.
5. No Form Builder to their software
6. A new email address that’s not forwardable
7. The agent sites offer little customization, and numerous types of HTML are not allowed
8. Very high costs for teams (KW really focuses on the team concept so this sounds like a big issue)
9. KW can potentially see agent’s clients / leads/ prospects
10. Feeling like people are being forced to upgrade to the Pro product

eEdge Pro

In conversations with individuals familiar with the details,  it’s become clear to us that the basic product of eEdge is either a loss leader or a product that Market Leader and the other companies behind eEdge are using to upsell agents to eEdge Pro.  Knowing the costs for providing agent websites, CRM, IDX, transaction management, and support is an expensive proposition.  Even with a large volume of users, I believe that their costs are above $10 between all the different items they have to include not to mention future development.  Therefore, they must sell individuals on the Pro version of the system.  That system is what someone would get when they sign up with Market Leader for the full package of their Growth Leader system.  There are however numerous complaints that people are paying $15 and will have to pay $99 next year to get the full version.  Numerous people have also spoken with us about the fact they believe Market Leaders system to not be a full CRM and instead more of a lead management system.

Here’s some other items you’ll need to upgrade to eEdge Pro for:

• Your own URL (you’ll have to use yourname.kwrealty.com unless you upgrade)
• Change your website theme
• Post listings to Craigslist
• Send out property postcards via email
• Mobile version of the lead manager
• Track what properties clients are viewing, what properties they have saved, etc
• Get site reports and analytics
• Read more about eEdge Pro

Why Did Keller Williams Do This?

I think Rob Hahn at 7DS Consulting makes a very interesting point over on his blog about this being a dramatic SHIFT in Keller Williams’ history.  A little back history, Keller Williams previously has always taken a very libertarian, laissez faire “spend your money like you want” approach with both their “team leaders” and their agents.  In the past it’s always been that they had the power to make choices as long as it didn’t effect profit sharing dramatically.  They recruited entirely a cost basis that the company would cut and trim costs as much as possible so it could share profits back with all the agents.  The company as a whole has spent very little on anything for agents.  They’ve really only paid fees to get items at a discount.  This like personality tests for new agents or TopProducer at a discounted cost are examples.  Now, having every agent in their company purchase a product is a real change in their business practice since they are now telling people what they should be using.  The benefits to the company are clear however.

• Long term cost savings on transaction processing
• A roll up reporting system that allows them to keep tabs on all the leads that an agent is working on
• Build a nationwide system of 80,000 agent sites all focusing SEO and branding toward the main company page (notice all the sites are defaulted to using yourname.kwrealty.com)
• A differentiation strategy by using technology to recruit

So again let us reiterate that we applaud KW for choosing to take a differentiation approach by using technology.  And there are probably numerous items that MarketLeader and Keller Williams will have to work out when it comes to the product.  But at this time do you feel that eEdge is a pro or a con for the company as a whole?

UPDATE:

3/9/2011 4:15pm

Two glaring issues have been pointed out to me

1. If you add a lead in the system to be referred to another KW agent, the system is not currently setup to only send it to another KW agent.  Someone reported to me that their leads were sent to agents at other companies like Re/Max and Coldwell Banker.
2. UPDATE: This appears to be fixed – Someone else pointed out to me that in fact any agents who link incorrectly to their website themselves, or have someone link to them and misspell their name etc encounter an interesting issue.  The incorrect page doesn’t go to KW.com instead it goes to ….. JustListed.com a sub company of Market Leader!  Click misspelledname.kwrealty.com to try it out.  This means any leads that could have gone to the agent they were supposed to or more importantly to ANY KW agent could potentially be lost to another client of Market Leader.

On one hand I’m thinking: Congratulations!  This is what we’ve been waiting for and something so desperately needed.

On the other hand I say, It’s about time!  Why is it that these sites have been around since 2004 and 2005 and we’re just now getting attention paid to the details.  Consumers demand accurate data, and the Realtor ends up looking like the bad guy when they have to explain to a client that the data is wrong on these sites.  Even Trulia themselves believe that up to 8% of their inventory is inaccurate with a major item such as status or price.

I’ve been railing on this point for two years now.  I sat down in the early days with representatives of Zillow and suggested to them a similar system using a Pin Code on each listing that the MLS would send to authenticate accuracy.  I was so passionate about providing this level of data accuracy to these sites, Tribus actually at one point considered obtaining a patent on a listing accuracy system.  (I’m intrigued to see if Trulia’s auto correcting system will provide a very high level of matching?  I always worry about trying to match Street with St. and ST and St or better yet Saint with the same letter combinations!)  Honestly I believe that if Zillow ends up implementing something similar they will then have some of the best data in the industry on real estate market trends.  The reason their data is so bad right now (up to +/- 20% in my home market of St. Louis, MO) is because they have old data and no data on certain homes for sale.  If that changes how good will their model become.  It also makes me start wondering, Trulia has a decent collection of market reports however they don’t push it often.  With their data getting better, will they make a run at Zillow’s Zestimate?

In thinking about this however, I wonder if many MLSs will participate in Trulia’s Direct Reference platform.  With their data getting better it’s possible that they (or Zillow if they build something similar) would have a lot of push back from MLSs and Realtor organizations due to their investment to push the Realtor Property Resource, or RPR.

No matter what, better data in any way is better for the consumer, so cheers to Trulia for taking the first step!

Update: Ironically when we posted this to Facebook, we replied to Trulia and Zillow.  I was lead over to the Zillow page to find the below:
Notice the “Again.”  This is unacceptable.

Listing syndication sites, these sorts of problems are frustrating to us all.  Please let’s work together to fix this!

TRULIA LAUNCHES “TRULIA DIRECT REFERENCE” ILLUMINATING A NEW PATH FOR LISTING DATA QUALITY ONLINE

Initial Results Show Over 8% of Listing Data Distributed for U.S. Homes Have Inaccurate Price or Status Information

SAN FRANCISCO, March. 3rd, 2011 – Trulia.com, a leading site for real estate professionals, homebuyers and sellers, today announced Trulia Direct Reference, a quality assurance system which uses Multiple Listing Service (MLS) data to ensure the accuracy of online real estate listings. Participating MLSs provide accurate reference data (e.g., list price, status, etc.) about their listings; then Trulia identifies data discrepancies between the MLS data and that provided by 3rd party syndicators and other non-MLS sources.  Trulia automatically reports data discrepancies back to the MLS, broker and listing agent, providing full transparency into the data Trulia publishes in its search index.  Trulia welcomes MLSs to participate in Trulia Direct Reference whether or not they are syndicating their listings to Trulia.

via News Room – Trulia.com – Press Releases.