Are site's like Zillow and Trulia needed any longer?

Gary, I think you raise some good points, I can say that I have not seen the return from Trulia, when I joined for extra exposure.  I think my money was better spent advertising in my local penny saver.

Zillow doesn't exist to serve home buying consumers.  It exists to sell advertising, for which real estate agents contribute the contant and Zillow gains the advertising revenue.

Although most of us offer IDX searches on our websites, I think consumers still automatically go to Trulia, Zillow and Realtor.com to find properties. It's the only 3 they know until they stumble on an agent's site. They may not be needed but they will still exist because consumers are going there and we, the professionals are feeding money into it.

Hi Gerry - I just read another blog post somewhere on AR about the top 1000 sites on the web. The top three for real estate were some Chinese site, then Zillow and Realtor.com in almost a dead heat. We know there's a better way to do it, but the consumers don't...yet, and until they do, we'll have to live with it.

Gerry, in most markets, especially the larger ones, people will still go to the site that comes up a the top of the search results, and those 2 are always there. It's fine, as long as the agents that are there to offer local information are the ones that know how to use SEO to their benefit, and that's something we learn here every day.

I dislike Zillow and Trulia simply because the listing information is not accurate in my opinion.  Tomorrow I am showing homes to a relocation buyer who sent me 5 listings to view that he found on Zillow, 2 out of the 5 no longer are for sale one was withdrawn and the other Sold but theyare still on zillow???

I think it's important to have those sites setup and take advantage of the free services.  It would be interesting to see what sort of return agents are getting on their zillow, trulia, realtor.com investments. 

Most agents don't have their sites setup correctly.  For example zillow populates local agents based on zip code and not city name.  Most agents have no idea it works like this.  I don't tell them because frankly I don't want them to know what I know. 

realtor.com has been an excellent resource for listing rental properties.  It's part of my KW program so I'm using it.  It may not be somewhere to focus but being aware of it, having a nicely setup profile, and some customer feedback would have some value. 

I've gotten a few leads from those sites this month alone and I don't pay for anything. 

btw what course are you teaching and where?  Rayac? 

You can have a great blog, a great website, even be number one on Google for certain search terms, but unless you have the volume of traffic that AR does, or Yelp, Zillow, and Google etc, then the opportunity that gets missed is being in front of all those eyes who are interested and already coming to these sites looking for real estate information.

Also, not everyone coming to Zillow is looking for just listings either, the 100,000,000+ homes with data on the site gathers about 25 million avg monthly inquiring minds and views.  As long as there is a need for real estate information beyond just homes for sale or sold, there will always be a need for sites like Zillow.

big guns??  lol~ 

BTW Gerry, here's 10 other items you may want to know about that Zillow has which offer value to both the consumer and to real estate professionals like yourself.  I put them on my profile page for you, at zillow.com/profile/bradandersohn.  I didn't want to spam your post by putting the actual link, but stop by and check them out, there are some great tools and ways to use zillow that can help grow your business locally and in a challenging market.

My door is always open to you if you need help, have questions, or just want to brainstorm on ways to use sites like AR and Zillow and the others to build more relationsghips and do more business. Call anytime - 707.646.1876  :-)

I think the tech savvy realtor can offer many of the same tools but the consumer doesn't know that and they tend to head to what they know which are the big sites like zillow, realtor.com, etc.  

Gerry - happy to help anytime. :-)

Gerry...I started a localism site "Lebanon News to Use" way back when they were first offered...I get calls all the time from it...Best $9.00 or whatever it is a month I've ever spent...Enjoy your day.