Kirk Tidwell

This is interesting and I have often wondered how it would play out. For the record... Our site does not rely on feeds from IDX and we are not owned by a broker or a real estate agent. I know of some sites that are owned by brokers that use IDX feeds. It would be possible for a broker in this situation to take advantage of buyer contact information that passes through this type of site. The broker owning a site that advertises another broker’s property has the ability to see his competitor’s leads and could use the information to try and convert the lead. My guess is that they are not against listings being placed/scraped/propagated on the non-broker sites. They are simply trying to keep themselves out of Law Suites for Conversion with the broker owned sites. There are PLENTY of non-broker sites and in the end they will continue to propagate listings to them.

There are many ways that a real estate company can get in on the long tail. One of the ways to be found is getting on the niche sites, as you have mentioned. The hard part about this for most agents is trying to separate the good sites from those that are just trying to get their money. One should always do their homework on a site that they are considering spending advertising dollars on. Some of the key things they should look for are traffic volume, length of visit, demographics and key words that drive traffic. They should educate themselves on the terms used in the quantification of traffic. Unique visitors, visits, page views and hits all mean very different things. One unique visitor to a site may visit it five times in one day. During those five visits the unique visitor might generate 100 page views. While generating 100 page views he may cause 1000 hits. There are many free tools that can help agents in the site evaluation process. Quantcast.com (my favorite because of the great demographic content) Compete.com and Alexa.com are a few of the sites that can help. These site also have tools one can use to compare sites side by side. If there are any other tools that folks use I would like to hear about them.