Homes & Land, Prudential announce data-sharing deals

Real estate franchise network Prudential Real Estate Affiliates Inc. and media company Homes & Land have announced agreements to distribute property listings information for display at third-party online real estate sites.

Homes & Land, which publishes several print magazines and operates the HomesAndLand.com Web site, which targets affluent home buyers, announced an agreement to feed all of the HomesAndLand.com property listings to real estate marketing and valuation site Zillow.com.

And Prudential, which earlier this week announced that it will share about 140,000 property listings with the HGTV-affiliated FrontDoor.com site, will also supply this feed of its network's property data to Trulia.com, a real estate search and marketing site that has about 2 million listings.

These are the latest in a series of deals that have brought bulk data feeds of property information to Web sites not affiliated with brokerage companies. Such deals speak loudly about the growth of third-party real estate search and marketing sites, and a growing openness among some brokers to share property listings in an effort to boost sales and draw in new clients.

Major real estate brokerage and franchise company Realogy last month announced plans to expand an earlier data-feed agreement with Zillow to a bulk feed of about 700,000 property listings from its affiliated brands' offices. Realogy also has announced property information-sharing agreements with Trulia, Google and FrontDoor.com.

In addition to the bulk data feeds, Prudential Real Estate Affiliates announced plans to boost the visibility of its network's property listings at Trulia by paying for the properties to appear as "Featured Listings" at the site. These featured listings appear in the top three search results when consumers search for homes with matching criteria, and these listings will include Prudential branding, according to the announcement.

Prudential Real Estate had about 2,100 franchise offices and 64,000 sales associates in its franchise network as of Dec. 31.

Earlier this month, Seattle-based Windermere Real Estate reported a similar advertising deal with Trulia to boost the visibility of its listings at the site.

Trulia, founded in 2004 by two Stanford University students while pursuing master's degrees in business administration, is among the fastest-growing U.S. real estate Web sites -- the company reported that 93 of the top-100 largest U.S. real estate brokers now supply property listings information to the site.

A group of online companies in January announced plans to standardize the process for sending property listings information to the range of online real estate sites to simplify the process for brokers and others.

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