Are You Syndicating Your Listings?

For a second there I thought Greg was anti-syndication. (I guess it was the title of the video.) I haven’t really run into much anti-syndication sentiment mostly ignorance about the how and why of listing syndication. Have other folks heard anti-syndication arguments?

ZipvoGreg:

I’m not arguing with you – just sharing the other side with Geek Estate readers.

It’s not about total traffic to the website. It’s about traffic to the individual listing. The client only cares how many people are viewing ‘their listing’. So, if a Realtor’s personal website gets 26 hits for a specific listing in a given day or week and the T, Z< FD, et all generate 1 or 2 hits, then your argument for traffic suddenly carries less weight. When you factor the dilution of ads from other agents/services/properties on the same page as the client listing on syndicated sites, then you have even more arguments for stopping syndication. Finally, most syndication sites do not have the same amount of listings as a local Realtor’s IDX solution. Therefore, the buyer consumer has a great chance of missing a property that could be perfect for them. This is why agents are considering stopping syndication.

That is right, it is the listing agencies listing and even more important. It is the sellers home and they hired them to sell it and get it exposed. When are are these old fashion agents going to grow up?

As I have mentioned before. I have never met a seller that did want as much exposure as possible.

We even syndicate our open house postings using http://www.OpenHomez.com . It saves a bunch of time and gets us a much wider distribution than we can get by ourselves. And, the links all come back to our listing sites. Something to consider. Broader distribution, more eyeballs, more traffic, more potential buyers at the open house.

LAR

Brad,

I clearly understand your point. Yes, on some of these “ad based” site models the call to action is the ad. I am not advocating it to be great to have an ad next to your listing but, realize that when you’re dealing with a 8,000 pound gorilla next to you wouldn’t it make sense to use him for what it’s worth? If your Seller isn’t happy with that, then yes don’t do it. But, are Realtors assuming that there Seller doesn’t want this? I would argue that most Seller would be looking at you crazy if you told them that you don’t syndicate to these sites.

Regarding traffic, all I am saying is that to get 5 to 7 Million unique a month isn’t nothing to sneeze at! I am crystal clear on the fact that doesn’t equate exactly to listing views. But, it’s a serious amount of people. Then, if you’re active in that “Social Network” blogging and answering questions I know for a fact Realtors get business from that. I’ve meet with a Realtor that told me 30% of his business came from blogs and answering questions on ActiveRain. There are many like that.

The “average” Realtor might not be concerned about Google Juice and mainly concerned about getting the maximum exposure to that listing to SELL that property ASAP! I’m just really interested in knowing what happens when you tell your potential sellers I don’t syndicate to these sites cause I am “scared” of being out ranked by them. I think this is a question for Sellers to answer!

Would you just want no ads on your specific listing detail page, or are you wondering how much it would cost for realtors to keep all ads off the entire site? Those are two very different potential scenarios.

Drew:

I’d love to the hear the numbers both ways, but let’s assume No Advertising whatsoever for the sake of this discussion. I do believe the vast majority of Realtors will be fine with movers, inspectors, attorneys, lenders, and other support services to the real estate transaction but most are just sick and tired of being upsold on R.com and forced to spend more to feature a listing. Or worse yet, have their competition from across town have an ad pop-up next to their own listing. I think most NAR members would like for NAR to buy back R.com or to partner with T & Z for a new web solution. The question is… what would that cost?

We’ve mainly heard anti-syndication sentiments here in Miami. The old-fashioned attitude that “it’s MY listing, you come through me and only me to see it”. A very closed minded attitude which seriously limits both exposure and potential sales.

Drew:

I understand position and respect the response. I really think there is something to this approach and will do my best to elevate it to national attention. I just think it would be helpful for me to get attention from above if I knew the numbers were even feasible. I believe there are over 1 MM NAR members almost 2 MM licensed agents in this country. It just seems a national service giving the members what they want (and paid for by the members themselves) would be a fantastic solution. Thanks for this topic and thread of conversation.

I look forward to meeting IRL sooner than later. Any chance you’ll be at REBCPHL?

Let’s make sure to find each other at REBCPHL and share a beer, chat, or both!

I feel like I just got scolded by my moms.

Spencer:
The majority of those 500k unique visitors are current home owners checking the value of their own house. (Last I heard the average time on the site was under 30 seconds) The actual number of qualified buyers is much lower. Zillow launched with a premise it knew would attract the greatest number of users, zestimates. Because its advertising model was based strictly on total traffic numbers, it didn’t care if visitors were serious buyers/sellers. Only recently has the company began to shift to offer information far more valuable that zestimates. This attracts a smaller, but more qualified audience. However, as long as Zillow leads its marketing with ‘zestimates’ as it does with it’s iPhone application, the numbers will be highly misleading.
Of the three major search sites, Trulia, Zillow and Realtor.com, clearly Zillow has the least qualified users. Then again, if you are using Zillow as one of many marketing channels as outlined in a listing presentation, the only thing that matters to your client is maximum exposure.

Kristen,
Sorry to tell you but you’re wrong.

Zillow gets 9 million unique visitors per month. The CEO of Realtor.com (Erroll Samuelson) spoke at a conference today in San Diego with me and said they get 10 million uniques per month. Zillow is growing 72% year-over-year so it’s just a matter of time before Zillow becomes the #1 real estate website. In addition, Zillow has the #1 real estate iphone application with over 400,000 downloads in the first 7 weeks alone. We think that’s more than twice the #2 real estate app.

2/3 of our users say they’re in the market to buy or sell a home either now or in the near future. 25% of our visitors say they use Zillow as their “primary home shopping site”. We get over 15 pageviews per visitor and send millions of free clicks to our brokerage partners’ websites each month. In addition, there’s very little overlap between brokerage sites and Zillow — there are two customer segments (those that use broker sites and those that use real estate search sites like Zillow). According to Nielsen, 3 out of 4 visitors to ColdwellBanker.com (the #1 brokerage site according to Nielsen) don’t goto Zillow in the same month. And the overlap is even smaller with small brokerage sites. So don’t assume that just because your listings are on MLS/IDX sites that Zillow’s buyers are finding them.

If agents want their listings to be seen by the millions of buyers using Zillow.com and Zillow on the iphone, they need to have their listings on Zillow.

Also, remember that it’s free for an agent or broker to put their listing onto Zillow.

We use Nielsen and Hitwise, but also occasionally look at Comscore. They all have various strengths and weaknesses (and costs).

For most of our stuff we use Omniture which looks at our internal numbers rather than a representative panel. Those are the numbers I trust the most, and when we cite stats like “8.9M UU, 72% growth year-over-year”, that’s from Omniture.