Tribus Real Estate Brokerage Technology

Tribus offers our premier listing syndication system that syndicates your listings across hundreds of sites.  Along with our listing syndication system, we offer enhancements and advertising to major sites like Trulia, Zilow, and more.    Unlike other services like Point2, Postlets, and VFlyer, the system works along with your MLS to automatically to push your listings out to these sites.  We pull in your listing photos, property descriptions, status changes, price changes, and more so that whenever you make a change in one place, the change occurs everywhere.  Most importantly unlike the manual sites and other services, when we syndicate your listings, we have the sites link back directly to the listing on a broker or agent website, NOT a site on Point2, Postlets, or VFlyer.  (The advantage is that the user can then engage with your site, search other listings, and you can better win them as a client.)

However, whether you have an automatic syndication service like Tribus ListingSyndicator, or whether you use a manual service, you must continue to monitor your listings across sites to check for irregularities.  In the past, we’ve monitored other brokers stealing listings to advertise as their own.  (Zillow and Trulia have yet to come up with a system that allows you to authenticate that it really is your listing.  Although we’ve publicly pushed a plan for over a year utilizing a Pin system when the listing syndicates.)  As an example, the company we setup in Los Angeles had their listings syndicated by Tribus.  The company deals in very high end real estate.  A home they had listed for $17,500,000 was overtaken by a competitor company.  I’ve personally had to make 3 phone calls to other agents / brokerages indicating they were in violation of law, by advertising a listing that was not their own.  Most agents and brokerages don’t understand the difference between syndication and IDX.

But this blog post stems from a major issue we encountered yesterday.

Yesterday, our St Louis affilaite received an email from Point2 Technologies indicating that Point2 was syndicating their listings.  After a check of Zillow and other sites, in fact the link to the property info page went back to a page on Point2.com  NOT to the brokers page.  What happened was that Point2 struck a deal with the local MLS, MARIS in St Louis, to syndicate listings automatically.  (It’s been Point2’s policy lately to extend functionality to do syndication automatically through the MLS if they can strike a deal.  The benefit being that Point2 gets the web traffic and hopefully agents see this and decide to upgrade to a paid version of their site which can cost $119/ month for a template site.)

So without any acceptance on behalf of the brokerage in St Louis, Point2 overtook the Tribus listing syndication system and started directing their leads to a Point2 page (an example of their pages here: 1649 Mount Vernon – Notice that all brokerage branding has been removed, the SEO is tremendously bad, it doesn’t follow the rules and regulations required by MO state law to display the office phone number, and they have chosen to sell ads around the listing. )  We have contacted Point2 to ask them to remove this from their site and they agreed that nothing had to be done for this to be turned on… It was a “do nothing and we’ll turn it on for you” system agreed to by the MLS.  By the time we had it shut down, hundreds of clicks were stolen by Point2 and all of the enhancements that were paid for had been removed.  We’ll have to now have someone go through listing by listing and reactivate each one.

Have you encountered similar problems syndicating your listings?  Let us know in the comments below!

Zillow continues to dominate the listing syndication search site traffic.  With an average of 8.3 Million unique visitors to the site each month in 2009, they are crushing their 2008 traffic by 60 percent!  But they want to be the number one site period to surpass Realtor.com, so what are they doing?

Zillow Adds Rental Listings – Charges For Them

Today Zillow announced they will be adding the ability for landlords to advertise their for lease properties on the site.  You can search them at Zillow Rentals.  Here’s the kicker, Zillow knows they need to start making money.  (After all they’ve received $87 Million in venture capital funding… someone is going to start wanting some of that back.) Without specific information, I’m sure that their ad revenues are down.  Their primary ad partners were Realtors advertising themselves and their listings.  With revenues to Realtors down they are surely not forking over the dollars they were willing to in 2006.

So, to add a for lease listing to Zillow they will charge $9.95 for the post to be live 180 days.  Each post is entered manually and not received via a syndication feed.  This means that Realtors will not have the ability to have their rental listings appear on Zillow without manual entry and paid insertion.

I believe that this new rental traffic could drive as much as 15% new traffic to Zillow’s site which would put them in the number one spot for all real estate websites.  We’ll see though if they can drive enough traffic by having paid insertions.  My guess is that at some point rentals will go the same way that for sale properties do.  Paid insertion for manual entries, free if included in the feed.

Search By Monthly Payment

Zillow is also adding a new Search by Payment feature to the filters once results are returned.  These new feature will compare For Rent listings with the expected average mortgage payment to purchase a home.  This way people in the market considering renting can see what they would be able to buy for the same price.

Zillow To Charge To Manually Insert For Sale Listings

While it’s a big deal that Zillow will be adding rental listings, I think the hidden story is Zillow finally going after revenue…

According to Zillow, 3% of all listings on the site are manually inserted.  This means a Realtor, Brokerage, or Owner is manually typing in the details of the home and uploading the pictures.  Like the rental listings, Zillow will now charge brokers to do this.  Again the fee will be $9.95 for 180 days listed on the site.  The fee however does get you something extra… manually uploaded listings will now be featured on the site.

However, this is going to effect some people that generally really understand the power of Zillow and are probably some of their biggest proponents.  Chances are these manual insertions are from small to independent brokerages and for sale by owners that don’t have the resources to create their own feed.  These agents need to immediately find a resource to syndicate such as Postlets, VFlyer, or Tribus’ listing syndication system.   (Owners will still be able to list a “Make Me Move” price, it doesn’t allow them to feature the property for sale.  Also if your listing is currently for sale it will stay on there until January 13th when it will expire or you’ll have to pay.)  I wonder though, will Postlets or Vflyer start to consider charging because of this?

Consider that Zillow has around 4 million listings on the site.  3% of 4 million is 120,000.  Potential revenue: $1.2 million every 180 days.  I think it’s more probable that only a small percentage of those people will end up actually paying for the service.  But it’s a start to making $87 Million.

So will landlords pay to place listings on Zillow? Will sellers and small brokers?  That has yet to be seen.

On the night of April 14, 2009, two fierce comeptitors entered the ring.  A cage match of sorts via Twitter.

In the left corner, Mr. David Gibbons, Community Director of Zillow.

In the right corner, Mr. Rudy Bachraty, Social Media Guru (that’s the title on his business card!) of Trulia.

This all started when Teresa Boardman posted a message to Twitter: “O.K. if an agent could only use one, which should they use? Zillow or Trulia?”

Up until this point their interactions had been very tame, but on this night a very lively debate was in order.  (Before I go through my dissertation and dissection, I will say that both were very civil and you could tell both were very passionate about their product.  They should each be comended really, because it brought to light some good features of each.  It also helped point out some items that might need some work.  This whole conversation was a great way to move forward so that each offers a better product.)

 Data:

(According to Hitwise)

MarketShare  of Online Real Estate Websites

Zillow: 3.25%  which ranks #3 of all websites

Trulia: 1.57% which ranks #10 of all websites

Search

“Zillow”: 0.56% of all search traffic 

“Zillow.com” 0.46% of all search traffic

“Trulia”: 0.19% of all search traffic

“Zillow.com search”: 0.12% of all search traffic

Zillow

So obviously on the face of it Zillow wins hands down in every capacity as far as traffic goes.  

With absolutely NO specific data to support this.  I believe the big victory for Zillow in this capcacity comes from their press and marketing machine.  Their primary product, the “Zestimate,” continues to receive much coverage in the media.   When real estate was booming, everyone wanted to know what their home was worth now.  It worked the same as checking your stocks in your portfolio, everything was going up, up, up!  Now that values are down, people still want to check their values.  ”How much has it dropped?” is the new question on people’s minds.  Zillow’s specialized product in this field becomes the top of mind search for individuals regardless if they are thinking about selling or buying a home right now.  (Although Zillow does point out that 90% of it’s users are looking to buy within 24 months.)  Becuase they are the main player in the immediate estimation of value market, they have what in the market field we call a top of mind brand.  It’s the first thing people think of when they consider a product.  Much in the same way that when someone thinks of a facial tissue they think of Kleenex or a photo copier in Xerox.  David Gibbons pointed out to me that “”it’s a starting point” … actually, our users’ awareness of listings has massively grown & now almost equals Zestimates.”  However, again with no data to back up my point, from anecdotal evidence, most people go to Zillow for the valuation and get the listings as a bonus.  It is very possible this will change, however, Zestimate is their killer-app and will always be their main traffic driver, in my humble opinion.  Now, Zillow is very smart to have listings on their site.  It does potentially bring in some traffic.  But a HUGE benefit to listings on Zillow is that they can get systematically better Zestimates by comparing what they thought the home was worth to what it lists for (and then what it sells for).    And as mentioned in the last blog post, Zillow becomes the site that answers the three questions anyone visiting any real estate site cares about.  Let me end by saying HUGE props to the originators behind the idea of the Zestimate.  You answered the demand of the users, and your traffic proves it was a big win.  (As a side note I’d like to point out that their mortgage information is excellent as well, but that’s saved for a different conversation.)

Trulia

Now, Trulia.  Trulia doesn’t have the functionality of the Zestimate.  But it does what it does, and it does it well.  Again from no scientific source, people I talk to like the interaction of listings on Trulia much better than Zillow.  They like being able to go to Trulia and getting great quality real estate search.  They like that the listings provide them all sorts of ancillary data.  The interface is just pretty.  But what I’ll really commend Trulia for is their search engine optimization of listings.  Without getting uber technical, Trulia creates a page for every single listing.  This page is then cached by Google and makes it often times the number one search result when you search an address.  Trulia also does something amazing for their site, they create a page for every city that has listings in it.  If you search terms like “Homes in St Peters” it comes up first again.  Therefore (with only the results I tested it with) trulia time and again beats zillow on placement of the listing (I will say Zillow was still on the 1st page, but if understand click rankings it’s the top 3 that matter).  As an agent, this should be a primary item of concern to you when list a home.  

Takeaway

So why does Zillow beat Trulia hands down in terms of traffic?  Simple.  People know to go to Zillow.  Trulia has a hard battle to fight in terms of getting in the minds of users.  A very informal poll I conducted a number of months ago showed few people know about Trulia.  Their first encounter with the site is when they search for real estate and then see it.  Zillow has been put in front of us for years.   The truth however is I don’t really see these two companies as competitors.  I really see Zillow’s focus being the Zestimate, and Trulia’s being listings.  (I think Zillow’s staff would disagree with me on this.  However, I hold firm in terms of what public sentiment is at the current time.)  I also see as an agent advertising on each site as a good spend of your ad dollars.  Having your listings featured and offering this as a service to your clients shows you are a forward thinking agent.  Please don’t take anything I’ve said here as a push of one over the other.  Again I really think you need to make sure your listings are on all sites.  (Our listing syndicator does this automatically for you.)

The data for the uber-SEO geeks out there:

A Zillow pro membership offers you unlimited follow links in an agent profile.  (Follow links give your site Google rank support)  Zillow also follow links your site from your listings.

Trulia does no-follow links on your listings and offers 5 follow links in an agent’s profile.   Trulia does no-follow links from your listing page.  However, Rudy Bachraty makes a good argument that as the listing sells the link would go anyway.  However, David Gibbons’ point is well taken that any follow link is a good link even if for a short period of time.

(For a more in depth Uber SEO Geek post see Jim Marks link here)

Trulia and Zillow Listen Up

There is one thing that these sites need to come up with a solution for though immediately.  At the present time there is no way for these sites to guarantee the agent listing the home on their site is the real listing agent.  Citing a specific example of our St. Louis affiliate, a few of their listings were hijacked by another area broker.  This broker advertised the listings as his own claiming that he felt this followed the rules of IDX.  As listing syndication becomes more popular I forsee this becoming a bigger and bigger problem.  Agents are either uneducated on the process or they feel that this is ok!  When you take in an XML feed why can’t you match their MLS ID to their MLS ID they could put in a field on your sites.  This way guaranteeing the listing agent is the one on the site.  Or at least the brokerage company?  Also why is it so hard to get this fixed?  It took 3 days to get the brokers listings fixed….

So previously we’ve discussed Salary based Realtors being a new potential trend for big companies, and the pending huge growth of independent Realtor firms.  However, we have yet to cover the possibility that the Internet will wipe out the Realtor.  (Let us start off by saying we think this is a terrible proposition for the consumer as it will bring numerous problems into the fold.)

Consumers are demanding home information and more and more it’s coming from sources other than a Realtor.  Look at Zillow.  

People want answers to three questions regarding the real estate market:

•  What homes are for sale?
• How’s the market right now?
• What’s my home worth?

Previous to Zillow, consumers had to call a Realtor to get a valuation of their home.  That Realtor would have to do a CMA of the property and then the homeowner would have to deal with the salespitch of the Realtor.  Zillow saw that consumers wanted instant answers and no sales pitch.  So their business model served that purpose.  Later they started to answer the question of “How’s the market?”  with their real estate market reports.

Now, many Realtors will argue that Zillow’s valuation is far off actual value.  Zillow itself admits it’s “Zestimates” are off by 8-20% depending on the market.  But homeowners are either oblivious to this fact or they just don’t care.  Their need is being satisfied.  This alone should worry Realtors that don’t look to answer the home owner’s craving.  Consider also that as Zillow nails down their data to become more accurate, we could see Zestimates within 5%.   Zillow’s data comes from public record searches right now.

As valuations are becoming more accurate, and Zillow is answering the question of “How’s the market doing?” look at the question of “What Homes Are For Sale?”  Consider that according to Hitwise, a website tracking company, of the top ten real estate related websites just two are brokerage companies: ZipRealty (A salary based brokerage company) at #4 and ReMax at #7 !  Agents can now place their listings on Zillow.   Zillow is number #3 because it’s answering all three questions.  Zillow has repeatedly said they aren’t interested in entering the brokerage business.  And in fact they are doing what they can to try and push agents.(A smart move on their part since their income relies on advertising from brokers.)  Zillow’s Director of Community Relations, David Gibbons is quick to point out that “a Zestimate is and always will be an estimate.”  He goes onto mention, “…our Advice, Directory and Mortgage Marketplace (not just for sale listings), are all designed to connect homeowners with reputable and knowledgeable local professionals. There’s a large variance in the range of expertise among pro’s in the RE industry and so a major reason 73% of (CA) sellers use Zillow is to find a Realtor they can trust.”  Clearly let’s state that in no way is Zillow looking to be a replacement for the Realtor.  We simply bring them up in this post to point out the fact that Zillow is filling a need that the consumer had.

Can you find an answer to these three questions on brokerage websites?  (Although you can on some agent sites: See Here the big three buttons.)  Not really…. Companies with huge technology budgets could create a product that offers similar functionality to Zillow with more accurate data.  They could have ALL listings for sale instead of just those syndicated to them.  They could provide real data on how the market is doing that updates immediately.  The data could be given down to the neighborhood level, not city wide like Zillow does.  Yet, do you see this offered? No.  Today, even brokers without technology budgets can find companies like Altos Research to provide amazing data on how the market is doing. 

That brings up the next point:  As consumers learn where to get answers to their three main real estate questions, can someone provide them a solution to put the full transaction process online as well?  Redfin offers something like this.  You can complete much of the transaction online and in doing say buyers and sellers receive a commission refund (in states that allow it) of 50%.  There is still a Realtor involved, but as that moves forward does the Realtor become necessary?  Can Buyers and Sellers facilitate their own transaction process listing the home online, schedule the showing of the property online, offering a standardized contract online, setting up a standardized inspection resolution process, and proceeding to closing?

If real estate agents don’t step up to gain trust through customer service and education increases.  This is a very real possibility.  As Zillow answered the demand, so will someone else.  Take a look at the example of ForSaleByOwner.com .  They stepped out onto a branch in 2008 by suggesting through a press release that you could list it on their site for a low fee, yet they would put it in the MLS for you which would then push it out to sites like Realtor.com  This created a HUGE uproar in the Realtor community.  How could they do something like that?  One of the last remaining tools in the Realtor arsenal that can’t be provided by someone else is MLS access.  By our understanding what the company was doing was actually listing the homes through a Realtor in California who would then put the listings in the local MLS regardless of where the home was listed. This would then push it out to the syndication sites including Realtor.com.  But they were responding to a perceived demand by consumers that had a distrust of agents or a belief they provided little to no value.

Now let’s take a second to make an argument here for why the Realtor is necessary:

1. No matter how much a computer can process data, it’s never is as good as a human that understands the market and can shape the data into real world.  Data tells a story but it takes interpretation to weed through fact and fiction.
2. Hiccups happen in transactions.  Realtors are the glue that hold them together.  When Buyer and Seller want to come to a meeting of the minds sometimes it takes an outsider to meld the two parties together.  Emotions can run high when dealing with the biggest investment of one’s life.  For example in today’s market agents are seeing “low-ball” offers.  However, these offers might in many cases yield a transaction when the two parties come together.  But on first look if the transaction is only online, the Seller might walk away from the table thinking a transaction will never come together.
3. Buyers need a hand to hold when going through properties to look for things to avoid.  4 layer roofs, troublesome foundations, improper electrical fixtures, etc.  These are things that Realtors are trained for, but many Buyers don’t know about.  A Realtor can help to avoid huge problems down the road by helping in this capacity.  They can also help at inspection time when realizing what to watch out for and what isn’t a big deal.  On a report, GFI protection needed sounds scary, but in actuality it’s usually not something worth fighting over.
4. Even with all the technology on futuristic shows like Star-Trek there are still doctors there.  Professionals know what they are doing because it’s their lives.  It’s experience that can’t be programmed into a computer and the average Buyer and Seller just don’t have.  It’s the same reason why most individual investors put their money in mutual funds instead of individual stocks.  They know they don’t have the time or energy to watch the market and trade accordingly.  A professional like a Realtor is necessary in the transaction.

However, if brokerages don’t start answering the concerns of Buyers and Sellers, competition will heighten and you will see companies offering products that try to supplant the Realtor.

Tribus offers one of the most comprehensive listing syndication systems available today.   Unlike many other companies, our system works directly with your MLS to push listings to over 35 websites including Trulia, Zillow, Craigslist, and more.  This means that your agents don’t need to enter them into a second system to syndicate.