From the UT: SD real estate firm cuts ties with Trulia, Zillow

[poorgradstudent]

http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2012/jan/30/third-party-syndicators/

Interesting… I imagine this will be a short lived move. As a potential buyer, trulia/zillow are the first place I tend to go for listings. I find the actual MLS pretty clunky in general. For good properties at a good price trulia and zillow are less important for attracting potential buyers; I’m talking about the kind of houses that go on the market and get a reasonable offer within a week. But for properties that languish on the market, more exposure is certainly a good thing.

Here’s the thing: there are far less scrupulous websites that can give you MLS access without using a realtor. I’ve used them myself when looking at certain properties. If realtors limit who can see a property listing, they are really only hurting their sellers. Long term this is going to drive away business even faster.

[ljinvestor]

If I had a listing with his brokerage I would pull it. Yes, he makes some valid points but I’m interested in exposure if I’m selling.

I also prefer to search these sites first rather than having my realtor set up a search for me.

[CA renter]

This move doesn’t benefit buyers (who won’t get to see all the listings on their preferred sites), nor does it benefit sellers (who don’t get the exposure they are supposedly paying for).

So, who is this supposed to benefit, again? Oh, that’s right…realtors. And this guy has the audacity to complain about middlemen?

[Coronita]

Why is this bad?

Find a friend who is agent and they give you all the info you need.

[sdrealtor]

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.

[temeculaguy]

There has to be a balance and perhaps this act (and similar ones like it) will help the market find that balance. The old business model, where a realtor picks what to show you and tells you what it is worth, is dying. I initially saw the guy in the video as someone who is grasping at keeping things the same. But as I thought about it I remembered my frustration with the foreclosure sites when I was shopping. How they kept orphaned data, overstated data, listed the mailing address as a foreclosure (when a rental or vacation home was being foreclosed on, they would list the owner’s primary residence because it was where the notice was mailed) and a whole host of other things that made 9 out 10 listed foreclosures inaccurate. Hell I lived in my house for a year before I finally saw it dropped from the listings. There were some that were better than others, some cleaned up their act, but in the beginning it was anarchy and a total waste of my time. I ended up having to do it myself.

Early on I noticed Zillow listings were out of date, so I ignored them. Redfin stayed on top of it, but that was mls data and if you found one you liked, the listing agent still got their comission, the buyer’s agent just took less because you did the searching, they just did the offer. It was a different model, but not like what this guy is complaining about. In fact when I was searching, redfin would not even waste their time if you wanted a short sale, it took too much of their time. They led me to a few but I had to go find my own realtor.

Like a lot of market shifts, some ideas fail, some companies fail, in the end what we get is a better system. Kaypro does not make laptops, but they were a pioneer in portable computing. Tesla may not corner the plug in car market, but we needed them to get the fusion 100mpg plug in this fall. Zillow and truila may not last because their acts of desparation may be their undoing, but their existence may shape the market. For every apple or amazon that managed to catch lightening in a bottle, there are a hundred webvans and cdnow’s by the wayside.

The real estate system has and will continue to change, but in the end there will likely be a fusion of market and transaction knowledge combined with open market data. The mls will either figure out a way to share it’s data, while preserving it’s integrity/security (like the code to the keybox, or when the seller is home), or the mls will be another story I tell my kids about a company that vanished because it failed to change. Maybe they should ask the newspaper industry for a few tips on what not to do.

[sdrealtor]

Good post TG and its nice to see you get this.
The truth is many MLS’s across the country have open access to consumers. Sandicor has rejected this concept for a long time but finally opened their eyes with a consumer site a few weeks ago. The front end still leaves a lot to be desired (i.e. redfin’s kicks their butt) but hopefully it will get better over time. It took these other sites to bring the change and thats a good thing. But beyond that most serve no useful purpose other than to try to skim leads and sell them to less experienced/skilled agents who have no other way of getting business. In the long run, its unecessary and of no long term benefit to buyers.

Its time for the MLS’s across the country to take control of what they have and provide access to consumers in a clear and easy to use format. iN the end that is what buyers want and need. One good dependable source of information.

There should be no reason to go any where else for the data. All the other “preferred sites” are drawn from the MLS source data. They are all less up to date, more prone to mistakes and secondary sources. Why go to a secondary source when you can go to the primary source the others are drawing from.

Here is the link if anyone wants to see what they got so far. I know the portal sucks but its a start.

http://consumer.sandicor.com/

[njtosd]

[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 –

[sdrealtor]

I’m not an attorney and really dont have any more. I always thought the more exposure the better but my business partner who is an attorney that has done work in the past with the recording industry always said these guys were stealing our IP and selling it back to us. It never bothered me and I never really got what he was saying until I watched that video. I dont know the exact legal issues involved but know those sites dont add much of any value to consumers anymore. Their shelf life is limited. The local board of realtors need to embrace open access and do a better job of providing it to consumers. Once they get that down, there will be no reason for these sites. Our leaders have let us down. I hope they get their acts together or as TG say they will lose their relevance.

[SD Realtor]

I liked the post from TG as well. Once more, the bulk of the sales on the third party sites are simply MLS listing through the IDX service. As previously stated, once these third party sites get hold of the data, it becomes problematic because there is not a comprehensive mechanism in place to validate what they post. This leads to the frustrating experiences that TG spoke of.

This is not to say that the current system cannot be improved upon because it can. As sdr said Sandicor is attempting to make a consumer site which is a good idea.

There is room for improvement in the current system. I definitely agree with that.

[Author]

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