The funny things is my business partner who is an attorney has been telling me the exact same thing for a few years now and it wasnt until this guys video that I got it. I was all for the exposure but he is right with an asterisk. The information sites like Zillow and Trulia are using is our intellectual property and they are scraping it off other sites. there are plenty of other sites out there that have more legal rights to this information like realtor.com, sdlookup and redfin to name a few. 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. If we dont buy into their strong arm tactics they sell the leads to some inexperienced agent who is willing to pay for them because they have no onther source of business. Then those agents take those out of town buyers around and sell them some other property. CAR, if you understood what this did you probably wouldnt like it. Those are the out of town buyers that come in and get screwed over by inexperienced agents and overpay for houses screwing up the comps. So the end result is that they are actually damaging responsible buyers like most piggs too.
If Zillow and Trulia werent around there would still be plenty of others who were doing things right to provide plenty of access to the information.
I hate to say it but I kinda agree with this guy now. The sad truth is our elected leaders have done a lousy job providing access to our data opening the door for charlatans like these. If they only opened up the MLS data with an effective portal all this would be a non-starter and those would not and could not exist.
