Real Estate Relativity

Trulia’s response to this issue is an excellent case study in online reputation management.

This post argues that an online real estate search leader has not emerged since 2005, given that the recent Inman Connect attendees “still talked about them last week as if they were launched yesterday.” Interesting argument. But consider the Inman audience: real estate centric folks like sales associates, consultants, media, pundits, etc. Where were the consumers [...]

At its core Trulia applies intense competitive pressure to traditional media firms that historically–in the collective sense–bilked real estate firms out of millions–if not billions–of dollars for essentially non-measureable advertising. Sure there’s the one-off case of a person who walks in the front door of a branch office clutching a Sunday advert who actually purchases [...]

UPDATE: Since I posted this in Dec ‘07, I’ve interviewed numerous brokers and agents who’ve said that Trulia’s delivered lots of real business to them (i.e., high quality traffic that resulted in leads that closed), and that their clients are extremely pleased with the exposure their listings get via the Trulia vertical. Further, several interviewees [...]

For the past couple of years, pundits of “real estate data transparency” have loudly argued that real estate firms must “accept the inevitable” and allow property listing aggregators to scrape their firm’s real estate listings, or for these firms to post their property listings “everywhere” a consumer will search online.
The analogous situation, claimed by these [...]