Real Estate Marketing SEO Blog

Real Estate News Paper Online Advertising

Or:Real Estate MLS gone.. again

Inman recently included a piece that alerted me to a new vortal that inlcudes newspapers' property listings. The site is called Homescape.com, a division of Classified Ventures. They have mirrored sites at HomeHunter.com and NewHomeNetwork.com.

Why isn't there alarm bells and prophesies of Armageddon going off in the Realtor world?

This site is aggregating "their" listings. We just talked about this at Real Estate MLS gone.

If you were to do a search for Sacramento homes, you would find the on line classifieds feed from the Sacramento Bee.

I did find that at least for Sacramento, the MLS listings that the newspaper-on line mls advertising was not included in the feed.

I guess if I were a Realtor, I could be upset for a few reasons.

One. Why don't they include the MLS listings? Two. And more disconcerning. Is this the beginning of the the big push to replace the MLS sharing that has been the mainstay and foundation of "Realty" Marketing as we know it. Three. Does the Realtor need another industry to compete for on line positioning? Especially when the Realtor community subsidizes many of these media outlets existence?

Real Estate MLS gone

According to recent reports by Borrell & Associates, real-estate brokers' and agents' websites are losing online market share of the real estate listings marketplace. They report that certain keyword real-estate searches have recently began to ignore most of the Realtor Websites in the search engines.

According to Borrell, real-estate agents' websites now populate Google's top 10 results only 9% of the time, vs. 29% only a year ago.

Newspaper real-estate sites now get in the top 10 about 12% of the time, vs. 16% a year ago.

To quote the popular song...."isn't it ironic"?

Realtor offices and agents pay their local and national Board of Realtors, Department of Real Estate and National Association of Realtors to protect them. Yet these lobbyists only serve to create the napster affect thru the IDX and VOW initiatives.

Yet, in many of the cases, the Newspaper sites that are beating the pants off the Realtor in search engine referrals, are getting the data from their friendly, local Realtor.

Does anyone in the Realtor community care that your "advocates" are giving your business away?

OK so here is the bad news. The above mentioned report is from a year ago (Dec, 2003). And the search engine environment has only gotten tougher as Google seems to have given way to relevancy and would rather you spend your money on their ADWords.

In September of this year Borrell released a report called:

2004 ANALYSIS:  ONLINE REAL ESTATE ADVERTISING COMES OF AGE. A superheated home-sales market has masked some subtle shifts in the $11.5 billion Real Estate advertising category.  Homes are selling faster than agents can advertise them, and a new, less expensive way of reaching home buyers has emerged in the form of MLS-based Web sites.  Meanwhile, an erosion of traditional media advertising -- particularly for newspapers --  has been occurring.  In 1997, newspapers received $755 per home sold in advertising revenues; today it's $605.   This report examines the shift and and provides additional insights from surveys with classified advertising, online managers, and MLS executives. 

Real Estate MLS

Most Real Estate Board of Realtors seem to look at the MLS as something of a public service.

How do I know?

Well, I had a conversation today with a very nice gentleman that works for a local MLS Board. Seriously, he was as nice as he is sincere. And he told me they were making the IDX data freely available as a public service.

Are you kidding me? Last I checked Realtors have a website in order to make money. My clients do not pay me a handsome sum of money such that they can provide charity, err I mean a public service.

This man works for a board of Realty that has blocked their members from using reputable MLS IDX Feed Services. The reason they did this, is in my opinion, a move to make themselves profitable. Seemingly a conflict of interest when they are supposed to be representing the Realtor that pays their dues.

But of course, why should the board worry about this when NAR, created Realtor.com to provide MLS data. Where listings are shared freely with the public and the brokers that NAR represents has to pay up to $100,000 to get leads from this site.

Now, lets be clear. Realtor.com exists only because NAR had to compete against MSN and others that were going after the stronghold that the Realtor community has held for all the years prior to the internet. NAR had originally got member brokerages and agents to subisdize this montrosity. They then started finding ways to monetize the free disemenation of their member data.

Then, after using the Realtor data, they have the gall to charge their member brokerages and agents such that they can get the benefits of the data. The Realtors already were supposed to be getting the benefits as each Realtor pays dues to be part of NAR.

Mimmicking a government bureacracy like perhaps the DMV, Realtor.com's base of supporters continue to put up with lousy service and poor results.

The Bastardization of the Realtors MLS

This in affect causes a Napsterdiztion of the Realtor's information. You will recall that Napster allowed the free sharing of MP3 files across the internet. This got the record industry into an uproar because they felt that sharing their records would in affect cheapen their product.

This is what is ocurring in the free sharing of the MLS.

The biggest problem as I see it it that the Realtor does a very poor job of creating tangible value for their service. Most of the perceived value of an agent is in his or her ability to negotiate a contract and hold a deal together.

However, the public has never really believed this.

While NAR, goes on with naive slogan campaigns, the Realtor that NAR represents, suffers. If John Q Public really does not get the true value of an agent, then the only tangible tool the agent has to offer is the perceived value of the MLS.

And if the MLs is for FREE. Then what is the perceived valuable of an agent to the real estate transaction? This is more than likely why websites like Real Estate For Sale By Owner has popped up over the past few years, offering cut rate, no frills listings.

Asking the public to register before viewing the Realtor data called the MLS is not only good marketing, it is neccessary for the very survival of the current model of marketing real estate.