Matthew Dollinger, president and founder of Gearbox Consulting, a real estate technology consulting firm in Chicago, says it’s interesting to see the paths those three portals have chosen. “Agents are always looking to get the best bang for their buck,” Dollinger says, who previously worked for @properties and Trulia.
To choose which, if any, of the top three portals is the best match for them, agents should first determine what they are trying to accomplish when leveraging listing syndication sites, Dollinger says. Brand recognition for themselves? Highlighting listings to sell quicker and appease sellers? Increasing lead generation?
If the latter is their goal, some of the conversion tools that search portals have to offer can be helpful when it comes to saving time, he says. “Agents who are doing business don’t have 15 to 20 hours a week to connect to online leads and nurture them to the point where they get them in a car and are actually showing them properties.”
In fact, he adds, a majority of consumers using the websites are 12 months out from getting serious about purchasing a home. Search portals can be helpful when it comes to saving time, he says, but it can get especially time consuming when trying to court potential clients who are actually six months or a year out from getting serious about purchasing a home.
That’s why search portals don’t work for some agents, Dollinger says, because they’re not getting the low-hanging fruit, like the cash buyer looking to close in less than 30 days. “That happens every once in a while, but not often,” he says. “The online consumer is usually much higher up in the funnel and not the low-hanging fruit.”
Depending solely on search portals to produce new clients isn’t a sound idea either, Dollinger continues. According to a National Association of Realtor’s homebuyer survey, 60 to 70 percent of people who buy a home find an agent through non-online means. Of the 12 million people on one side or the other of a transaction, about 10 million will have already chosen an agent before they search for properties. “That leaves a very small amount of people online looking to buy a home who don’t already have a real estate agent,” he says.
I think you are mixing up 2 separate conversations here. Syndication and third party portals are 2 different conversations. Syndication is how listings get somewhere and is a discussion on them choices brokerages are making about listing distribution. The third party websites are tools and advertising platforms that brokerages and agents can use to generate consumer contact/business just like they do print but with more bells and whistles. The fundamental question are third party portals effective platforms for agents to spend their marketing dollars? For the most part syndication is a decision at a brokerage’s management level.