Trulia and the debate over the value of media companies in real estate

Real estate search site Trulia is offering agents a featured listings advertising product, the company said Tuesday on its blog.

The ads will enable agents to place listings in top search results on Trulia and promote their photo, name and contact information to consumers. Trulia said it will give Trulia Voices users a free trial, and the subscription cost after that is $50 per month for 10 listings.

Trulia previously has allowed brokers to brand themselves and promote listings, but this is the first such play for agents.

Real estate bloggers and blog readers have already started ripping into the idea, and it's turned into a debate over whether the industry should give away listings to third-party sites like Trulia or keep them on their own sites and other brokers' sites via IDX. And this discussion almost always leads to the changing role of real estate agents.

Some of the readers commenting on a thread at Bloodhound Blog say they believe that new media companies like Trulia do nothing more than use the industry's own information to draw in consumers and sell it back to agents via advertising or leads. Many of these agents subscribe to the school of thought that agents should compete with third-party aggregators or media companies for leads, rather than pay for them or pay to advertise on their sites.

Others said they see value in showing sellers how they will market their homes in many different places online, noting that it's still free to post listings on Trulia.

One of Trulia's competitors, Zillow, is also positioned as a media company, collecting and creating a destination for real estate information that is supported by advertising from agents and others in the business.

David Gibbons of Zillow stepped into the recent blog debate, noting that it's consumers who see value in third-party media companies, which in turn defines the value of the companies to agents. As industry professionals, real estate agents will never be considered a neutral source by consumers, he said.

Trulia and Zillow aren't the only companies focused around the model of attracting consumers with real estate content and selling advertising around that content to those who work in the industry, like brokers and agents.

Realtor.com and Move are essentially media companies. Bankrate has done this in the lending industry for years, and big media giants like Scripps Networks have real estate divisions supported by advertising.

A study released last week by Borrell Associates was bullish on the prospective growth in the real estate advertising space, predicting that the online component of real estate advertising would grow almost 26 percent to $2.6 billion this year, moderate to a still-strong 12 percent growth in 2008 and then soar to $3.3 billion in 2011. By then, Borrell suggested, Web sites could control 37 percent of the realty advertising market, a larger share than all other forms of advertising.

Shameless plug/further reading: What is the outlook for real estate media business models? Inman News is interested in the discussion and has planned a panel at Real Estate Connect New York on January 10 to dive in and find out. "Online Real Estate as Media Enterprise" will feature top executives from Zillow, Bankrate, Trulia, Scripps Networks Interactive and REA Group. More info is on the Connect Web site.

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