All hail the new MLS.Trulia......
What happens to free?
Its worthless, maybe partially valuable, or eventually after hooking users like a drug, it charges a fee.
As a for instance, Active Rain is trying several revenue models that include various advertising and paid blogs. Trulia who took a battering last month is opening up its Trulia Pro:
What this company has done has been remarkable. It has out Realtored, Realtor.com by becoming THE online source for Listings without actually being a Realtor. It has become the online spot for listings by dominating the engines without being a Realtor. While NAR's members has handed them their proprietary content and even their mindshare (Trulia Voices).
This is what all the whining was about at BloodHound. But it is too late. Game over. But it was inevitable when the industry could not effectively manage its own listings.The only Gorilla in Trulias way now is Google.
Welcome to the beginning of the new real estate business. Congrats to Pete Flint and the Management team for a flawless strategy.
The industry has literally handed over its protected content to an outsider for no other reason than its members lust for better marketing than its leaders could provide them. Certainly Trulia must feel that it has reached a high enough "addiction" rate that it would be tough for agents to stop using the listings portal. Thus it is safe now to start demanding, I mean asking for a fee. Brilliant!
More Trulia and MLS Related Links:
- Trulia Battering (I link here for the Trulia controversy. I do not support the uninformed postulating on SEO which is a conglomeration of ideas that are for the most part poorly formed opinions by many-not all- who simply do not not know a page rank from a link, from a nofollow to a dofollow and their purposes. This bullet falls under my category above called partially valuable. But the problem with that is the poor blokes who will base their whole online marketing strategy on some BS that somebody wrote who wants to sound smart because they got a mildly competitive word ranked. Word of advice: do not base your marketing on something you got off a comment or even a blog post or article. This falls under the whole notion of free advice. If you do not pay someone, then there is no accountability, thus it is worth what you paid for it, NOTHING. And a low budget is no excuse for the delusions of grandeur caused by an orgy of free information available on the internet.Can you tell I am a tad annoyed by all the bad advice floating out there? But I digress...)
- How Do You Compete With HomeGain and Trulia?
- ERA Real Estate Feed Trulia
- The Great Realtor Giveaway
- Universal MLS
- MLS.Google.com
- Microsoft and the Loss of the MLS
- Real Estate MLS gone
