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:
Leading online real estate companies Yahoo! Real Estate, Zillow.com®, and Trulia.com today announced the adoption of a new standard data format for the distribution of real estate listings online. With this standard, real estate franchisors, brokers, multiple listings services, and other listings providers will be able to distribute their listings data to several of the leading real estate sites in one common format, making it easier to get critical information to consumers faster and more efficiently.
READ MORE.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.)
With TPP, publishers can offer their audiences the ability to find and research homes nationwide using Trulia’s innovative search technology, award-winning user interface and useful online tools like local real estate guides, heat maps and sales comparable information.
TPP can easily integrate with a publisher’s advertising program whether revenue comes from its local ad sales team or a national ad network. TPP is available to publishers free of charge and because Trulia hosts the TPP site, publishers will always have immediate access to Trulia’s latest functionality and features.
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Yahoo! Real Estate announced they’re now taking direct listings from franchisors and brokers.
Yahoo Inc. on Thursday launched its new online property listings program that lets franchisors and brokers post a complete set of home listings.
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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.
"We’ve come a long way since Zillow’s launch nearly two years ago, adding more data on more homes along with numerous new products and features. The hard work of our team has been heavily supported by an incredible amount of participation from the Zillow community of homeowners, buyers, sellers and real estate agents," said Lloyd Frink, Zillow co-founder and president. "Each day, more than 25,000 community contributions are made to Zillow.com — things like homeowner updates, photos, or Home Q&A. This type of active participation means a more accurate and transparent real estate community, which benefits everyone."
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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.
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