[quote=sdrealtor] The difference is sites like Trulia and Zillow ( as well as hundreds of others) take our intellectectual property, screw the integrity of that up in a very high percentage of the cases and then try to sell leads generated on them back to us. [/quote]

I always start paying attention when people start throwing around the “intellectual property” term. IP includes only patents (not at issue here), trademarks (probably not at issue here), copyrighted material (doesn’t apply to factual material without more) and trade secrets (since none of this is a secret, we can safely ignore this category). The only possible issue I can think of is that using the sometimes flowery description of the property (which goes beyond bare facts about the house/land) might be copyright infringement, depending on the manner in which the “syndicators” use that information.

What Zillow, Trulia, etc. are doing might be misleading, and inaccuracies might have a tendency to harm the professional reputation of listing agents, brokerages, etc., but I can’t see any real IP issues based on what I’ve read so far. I’d be interested in hearing your view, though, sdrealtor –