Zillow announces it will acquire Trulia!

Let the predicticating begin!

...And the big get bigger! I guess continuing as their own brand keeps the money flowing, from us!

Richard: I do not support this acquisition. I ceased blanket syndications of my listings years ago and never regretted it. I did it primarily to prevent rewarding Zillow with sales of my listings to competing agents featured on my property listing pages. Zillow basically put listing agents in a victims' position with this marketing policy.

Good morning Richard. I guess it is only a matter of time until there is but one entity owning it all.

Richard my business is not based on either of those 2 platforms and we'll see how that shifts in the future.  Change is going to happen.

Richard,

And so it goes, I just wrote about it also.  I think Realtor.com may be their next acquisition...change is afoot.  A

I'm just going to stay here in my little corner, doing my own little thing... whatever happens happens.  I can't change it.

Hi Richard, Norman, Comment #4 said a lot and if the brokerages were not so afraid, they would all be doing the same thing.  We still haven't learned that All Real Estate is Local. Now it would be just a darn shame if someone moving from the east coast to the west coast had to connect with agent websites instead of doing their house hunting on line through giant aggregators. 

The MLS which was intended to compensate the professional and licensed brokerage members of it, has been distorted to be in existence to provide information. This information is gathered by licensees of the Brokerage and they pay to use the system and keep it running. 3rd parties who are not paying anyone, take the information and use it to sell ads and sell back to the originators of the information in the form of identifying those on line participants who looked at it. They call them leads. 

If you think about this, unless you have some sort of mass migration to your area, chances are that most of the home sales are by people already living in or near the area. Keeping your information mostly centered there also creates a reliable place to look for the information and it may be considered " local". Years ago, we were all sold on the idea that bigger is better and you will benefit when you share the information nationally. Yet the local rules of MLS provide coop broker income only to it's members. I guess we can see what that " tease" created. 

Being practical, we also know how difficult it is to put the Genie back in the bottle. So unless this industry gets it stuff together, the future of it as we know it will remain uncertain as more and more want a cut of the pie. Soon the filling disappears. A pie without the filling is just plain crust.

PS, I forgot to mention in my wordy comment that I suggested this for feature. 

     Richard, I believe that you and I are on the same page regarding where this will lead.

     Earlier today, I received a phone call from an internet reporter in San Francisco regarding this merger.   He had seen my blog on this.   The reporter asked me who else might have opinions on this... I suggested that he scan the Feature Page of ActiveRain for the past few days and look at the articles on Z + T, and contact the authors.

Hi Richard, I just thought of something and while I haven't considered all the ramifications ( meaning that it is a gut instinct that may not actually be doable). If Congress passed a law ( I hate to even suggest government involvement ) but if a law was passed that a visitor to a site could opt out of making their identiy known to any third party other than the party that generated the information, there would be nothing to sell. Real Estate agents may not be the only ones buying this information. 

The only way to stop stuff like this is to stop buying the leads.

I have a client coming up that has already told me he does not want to see this on Zillow or any other 3rd party site.

I will explain how and the why's this weekiend and maybe keep it of the MLS.

Right now the only concern is how this acquisition will affect AR. Later, my concern will be how it affects real estate as a whole.

I am in the same boat as Tammie.. I am not too worried about this merger right now as long as ActiveRain doesnt get affected.. as a whole I don't think much will happen because they are too dependent on real estate agents to make their money.. why rock the boat when they are making so much money!