By Intero partners with industry leaders to market listings on the web 
There’s a race to control the online real estate space with Zillow, Trulia, Realtor.com and Yahoo! Real Estate taking the lead. These companies are quickly transforming the industry with listing syndication and information rich, consumer-friendly web sites that are offer buyers and sellers a whole lot of bells and whistles.
Some big announcements were made this week by Zillow, Trulia and Yahoo!, individually and collectively. For one, all three announced they’re adopting common data standards for listing feeds:
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And then . . .
Trulia announced its Trulia Publisher Platform (TPP), which will give Web publishers the ability, free of charge, to create co-branded online real estate sections powered by Trulia’s search technology. (This is said to be in response to Zillow’s partnerships with many of the major newspapers.)
Yahoo! Real Estate announced they’re now taking direct listings from franchisors and brokers.
Zillow announced they are coming out of beta, have improved their “Zestimates,” and have expanded their database to cover nearly 90 percent of US homes. They’re also saying that more homeowners are claiming and contributing to the information about their homes on the Zillow site, which is making the “Zestimates” more accurate, which in the past has been controversial.
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These announcements are a sign of the times. With more than 81 percent of today’s consumers going online to search for real estate, we at Intero are in line with these companies in thinking that online listing syndication is the future real estate.
In fact, long before many brokerages were even thinking about syndication, we were working on our online strategy, i.e. marketing Intero’s property listings to as large an audience as possible using search engines and syndication, ensuring our offices are at the top of specific regional searches, driving traffic to Intero’s web site through partnerships with companies like Zillow, Trulia, Yahoo! Real Estate and Realtor.com, and increasing the exposure of our agents in the marketplace.
Real estate is changing, and 2008 could prove to be the watershed year for the transition from offline to online marketing for listings. It will be interesting to see what happens in the next 12 months . . . new technologies, a changing landscape and a real estate market that is trying to stablize. Sounds like all the mixings for a big upheaval to me.
