Some days Web 2.0 is female dog, haha.
Realtor.com just released on their site that you can pull house values, nice! Oh wait, you click on a state and a little pop-up bubble tells you the average sales price for the whole state, well that doesn't help.
A few months back I met with a Realtor.com rep, and from our discussion it sounded like setting up Realtor.com on doing a Zillow/CyberHomes/Trulia type of system was just still a little TOO controversial, the excuse was that Realtor.com should invite people to call agents to engage in direct discussion. I understand that, however guess what happens when people don't get the full answer they're looking for right away when researching online? They go somewhere else. Until Realtor.com can spit out a value much like Zillow it will never be able to compete, because people looking online want instant results.
Ok so then the argument comes up, that would steal one of our services away that we the agent provide. Actually it wouldn't, you know why? People will still call you, and guess what? You won't have to do such an in-depth CMA!! You can get to providing them much more worthy services such as staging, showing advice, marketing plans, etc.
I do presentations for our local Realtor's association on websites, and while Realtor.com is the single largest traffic site on the web, our competitors as a single group (Trulia, Zillow, Dothomes, AOL, Yahoo) blow Realtor.com and it's entire Move.com network out of the water in monthly traffic figures by millions of visitors.
That spins onto another topic that personally upsets me, agent ranking sites. There isn't a single one that's run by NAR or any level of Realtor association, so what happens? 3rd party companies come in, get filled up with negative posts that you cannot challenge and are out there forever. Realtors seemed to take a hands-off approach because they don't want to hurt anybodies feelings and now they're finding their names stuck on websites with a 1 out 5 rating calling them a slime-ball and there's not a thing they can do about it.
Web 2.0 is passing us by, online consumers want interactive sites with instant results, yet our association in general seems to be stuck in past, insisting that it's best if consumers wait until "we" call them back or email them back. Sigh....
Comments(7)