NAR: It's time to make a move on Move

Wow...you guys are right...realtor.com should be free...the NAR should take it back...uh huh, that would work.  You people obviously have no idea what it costs to run a site like Move, or Realtor.com do you? Do you have any idea how much storage it takes to hold all your blurry, pointless pictures of half a bathroom?  And Brenda...you yourself said it's a good source of business for your market, and a CLIENT called you asking where her house was.  Imagine that, Jane Q. Public using realtor.com!  That's what you guys are really afraid of, isn't it...technology and progress putting you out of business.  They don't need you guys to drive them around in your cadillac and gold jackets anymore, that's scary...while you make thousands of dollars for slapping a sign on their front yard, kicking your feet up, complaining about how expensive move is, while you wait for your commission check...

As to why they didn't call you because of an MLS feed problem?  Do you really think they have the time or resources to contact every realtor, to tell them that there may have been a problem with a process, and they're working on it, and it will be resolved shortly?  You talk about adding costs....

There's a reason why realtor.com is the #1 website, and it's not because of you agents buying featured listings...it's because the public wants to search on their own, they don't need you to handhold them anymore, and they have the most comprehensive listing database out there now.

Why do realtors use realtor.com to enhance their listings?  it's not to make them sell quicker...it's to give the sellers the impression that you're actually doing something to market their homes...so they can see the pretty yellow banner, at the top of the search page, and say...wow, my realtor really does care...that's the real reason, isn't it?  to keep the sellers happy?  so they don't go to fsbo.com and realize they can cut you our of the deal and save thousands?

c'mon people...can you really tell me that on a million dollar house, you do SOOOO much more work than on a 100,000 house?  that your efforts are THAT much more, to warrant a 10X jump in commission?  uh huh, you want to talk about over priced...let's look at the entire realtor scam in general...buyers and sellers do most of your work these days anyway, you know it, we all know it.  So for you to sit there in your plush office, and complain about 'oooohhh, they're so expensive....I don't use them anymore'...who really gives a rats behind?  just go back to your hum-drum lives, and quit wasting time and energy complaining about somthing you really know very little about!!

thanks, all y'll have a great day now, y'hear?

:)

Don't you just love gutless blind postings that exorciate everyone but the writer?

Realtor.com hs to "pay for lots of storage for your half a bathroom photo?" Just how much does space on a hard drive cost these days? Let's see, one can buy 160GB back up hard drives for $100, so I guess that half a bathroom photo might take up .00001 of that capacity, so that would be a fair charge of 1/10th of a cent monthly. The rest must be profit?

The anonymous castigtor misses the point: Move.com does not deliver fair value to agents. Move.com is NOT the most popular place to look for homes; that belongs to Google. The vast majority of visitors to Realtor.com are other realtors.

92% of Internet buyers (who comprise 84% of all buyers) choose their agent with a search engine. Not a portal, like realtor.com, but a search engine. Until everyone wakes up and smells that rose, the waste of resources on realtor.com will likely continue unabated, even though NAR admits that 93% of all agents aren't happy with their website's production. NAR does not own Realtor.com. Move does. NAR gets a kickback on every subscriber, that's all.

Insanity is continuing to do the same thing and expecting a different result. DO you want to sell houses online? Get a good template site, hire good SEO to get it found, use soft lead capture and incentives to get people to register so you can farm them, call them instantly whenever they sign in. That's it, folks, with a few minor additions, like a welcoming homepage and full access to listings, good virtual tours, and IDX. There is no magic formula, it is just paying attention to those things that propel one to the front of online marketing.

Hi Mike,

I agree with you, however being in the real estate business you know about fair value.  Seller's don't set prices, the buyers do...as long as people will pay 4 bucks for a gallon of gas, that's what they'll sell it for.  When demand goes down, so does the price.  Same with houses, with services, with good SEO's...with realtor.com.  If people stop buying, they'll have to do something. if people feel they don't get a good value for their investment, then by all means, they should go  somewhere else, but they shouldn't complain about your own choices, nobody is forcing them to use any particular website, real estate agent, or website designer.As far as the price of storage goes, I agree, the price of a hard drive is cheap. The kind that you might back up your personal PC with.  but to deliver search results and images to 20,000 customers hitting a website at the same time with a hard drive your mom bought for you at best buy, it's just not going to happen.  at the risk of sounding like another geek, there's a reason companies like IBM, EMC, NetApp, and HP have enterprise-class storage arrays, with thousands of disks, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. Do some research, let's see how many 160GB usb drives google uses to run its website.  :)  I agree with you on the no magic formula, just get back to basics, as it were, and you'll go far.   As far as gutless blind postings go, I guess I'll post another one, but hopefully mine doesn't sound as confrontational.

Mr. Anonymous

Dear Mr. Anonymous;

Thanks for your well thought response. I know you know that I was being tongue-in-cheek with my allegory; Google has over 500,000 dedicated servers to handle the 85 Billion inquires they receive monthly. Realtor.com has 7 million page view monthly--page views, not visitors--and that does require real hardware, no doubt, but we have three million with just a few dedicated servers and no major issues.

As to your comments on pricing, I think they are right on: the current nosedive in pricing, however, I view as a long term good thing. When we are repeatedly bombed by data telling us that 85% of the residents of a typical town could not afford to buy their home there today, that says to me that prices were too high. We all know some of the reasons why, but my view is that--once we get through this unbelievable REO/foreclosure backlog, we'll have a more stable and lucrative market with realistic prices that will gradually rise again. I see that as a good thing.

The bad thing is the pain that everyone is going through right now. About the only good thing that can be said about that is that perhaps the glut of real estate agents will disappear and it can become a real career, again, for the dedicated and professional agent.

But, back to realtor.com. An institution that can only cite 7% of its clients as satsified with the production of the product would not succeed or live if not propped up by the exclusive agreement with NAR. Unless agents wake up, the disparity between those succeeding online and those failing will remain ridiculously large: 93% failing vs 7% succeeding (NAR's own stats). Even a monopoly should be able to deliver at lest 50% success, and Move isn't doing that for NAR members, in my opinion. Nothing will change until people start voting with their ad dollars and begin leaving realtor.com out of their marketing strategy. They'll come around fast were that to occur.

Ah yes, but I believe your numbers may be somewhat misleading? ...you say the NAR says only 7% of it's members are satisfied with their website.  But how many of those members actually have websites on realtor.com.  I'm a NAR member, and I have my own site, as do most of the people I know...Do you have numbers on how many NAR members there are and how many of those have websites through REALTOR.com?  Just curious.

Perhaps a better statistic to find out, to better illustrate your point, would be how many REALTORS with websites on REALTOR.com are satisfied?

 thanks,

Mr. Anonymous

Well, you seem quite well versed about realtor.com, so you should know that there are no hard numbers on what you ask, only NAR's numbers about websites and realtor disatisfation. But I can tell you this: one of the most important things to suceed online is being able to be found when people search online for homes, as they do over 870 million times monthly JUST ON GOOGLE! Pages on realtor.com are all subdomains--as are most realtor.com and topproducer sites--and they are not even indexed by Google. Draw your own conclusions, but let's agree to disagree and remember that if NAR could cancel their deal with Move, they probably would! Who wouldn't pay a lot more than 25% of revenues to have the exclusive for America's realtors? Who doesn't think Google, Yahoo, MSN and AOL wouldn't out do each other to land that franchise?

Realtor.com is about to get report to BBB.  They have done nothing but take money from me without giving any results.  I signed for one promotion and cancelled it in Januarywithin my recision time.  Finally they stopped it in April.  Now, my next challenge is-I paid for a year then joined a company that has a group contract.  Realtor.com will not let me keep my forner template nor will they let me have the rest of my money back.  So I am paying for a service they refuse to give me.

To all you real estate agents out there upset about Realtor.com.....You are right to be angry, the problem is I do not think you know why you are angry; and holding nothing back, you will not have much longer to be angry about Reator.com unless you continue to pay the inordinant amout of money that it costs.  Why?  Because it is nopt about quantity, it's about quality.  Yes Realtor.com ranks #1 as the most trafficked real estate website but over the last few years it's market share has gone from a +8% to a little more than plus 2%.  And don't shoot the messenger but it is exactly for the same reason you are all calling for NAR to take over.  The name Realtor.com.  What many of you fail to realize is that your prospects are going on line because they are not looking for a Realtor.  They are looking for properties.  That is why Trulia, Zillow and Yahoo real estate have closed the gap and why Realtor.com as of late has made a push for advertising listings. Here is what you all fail to realize....what makes an agent successful is not how many places their listings are or how many times their listings are viewed, but how many of those buyers are driven to an agents personal website as a result of the buyer viewing their listing.  when i click on a listing on Realtor.com I STAY at Realtor.com.  Now if you have the right website provider, when someone clicks on the other BIG THREE, the prospect leaves that website and lands on your personal website.  If you hadn't already guessed it, I am a Internet Marketing Consultant for one of the largest providers of marketing for real estate agents.  So next time you do any internet advertising or website marketing, make sure that you are generating traffic to "your" site, not their's!  Good luck all, if you can do it right, you can make a ton!

1. Realtor.com 5.91%

2. Zillow 3.87%

3. Yahoo Real Estate 3.30%

4. Trulia 3.0%