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I'm an SEO professional and the editor of two books on real estate marketing. In 2007, we received just over 7,000 responses to a survey we sent out to next time home buyers and we received more than 6,000 responses from brokers we asked to track where the PROCURING cause came from on their home sales for the previous 12 months. Suffice it to say, Realtor.com was the big loser. So was Homegain, followed by Trulia. Why? it's simple. Next time home buyers are not going to web portals to help them buy a new home. 74% of them went to Google to look for their home in 2006-2007. Trulia is just another Me Too real estate portal company. Their business model derives ad revenue from eyeballs looking at content as they post more listings into Trulia. I am not sure where Trulia gets their feature requests from, but it's clear they are not listening to next time home buyers. Our survey revealed that 82% of the next time home buyers who responded to the survey said they could care less about heat maps. They just want big photos, virtual tours and lots of homes to look at for free. No registration, just anonymous FREE search. Consumers aren't stupid. But many of them are getting Adult Attention Deficit Disorder. Thanks to Instant Rice, Instant Oatmeal, ATM Machines, FedEex... people have become quite used to getting what they want without having to wait. Our two year survey has shown proof positive the REALTOR still remains centric to the real estate transaction. Which is why BROKERS should invest into SEO for themselves so they can enjoy an organic page rank so they are visible when next time home buyers are looking for homes in their area. Do we need Trulia for this? No. We just need Google. You have AdWords for instant results and for long term results, we suggest brokers go and find themselves a good real estate seo firm, and not a bunch of over promising Bozos. Trulia is another infomediary and is part of the problem brokers face today. Tired of paying 30% of your commissions from Homegain? Tired of buying leads from LendingTree? Most of us are. Brokers need DISINTERMEDIATION -- not more of it. We need LESS vendors in our sandbox who are attempting to sandwich themselves in front of the broker and the customer.
Well isn't this a non-surprise. The same bozos that screwed up Homestore.com (Stuart Wolff) apparently has left a lot of the same idiots that never got nailed in the first wave of busts at Homestore or were too small and fell through the cracks. Didn't Stuart get convicted and given 178 years for his architecture of the near financial collapse of Homestore? Never mind that the fact that the public withdraw of trust and credibility for Homestore got so bad they had to change their name to Move.com. Now there's more bozos getting nailed doing things they shouldn't be doing by inventing more get rich quick schemes and Enron style accounting, no doubt. The big joke here is that Allen Dalton back peddles and still gets a huge compensation package to advise Move.com. On what? Business ethics? This is another joke. Hey Move.com, I'm a real estate consultant that won't mind giving you a great piece of advice here. How about changing your name now to Screw-Ups.com? This one is more appropriate and doesn't waste any more time or money. It's time for NAR to dissolve any and all contracts with Move.com. We have plenty of consumer choices now thanks to an infinite array of websites with far better fee-free leads for agents and better options for consumers. The media should stop wasting it's time on Move.com and Move on. No pun intended.