Pay to Play

While all three sites offer some free services and even an entry level pay-to-play subscription, agents seeking better listing exposure can opt for pricier plans, such as Zillow Premier Agent, Trulia Pro and realtor.com’s Showcase Listings. Zillow reportedly signs up about 50 Premier Agent-level subscribers a day, and added nearly 5,000 agent subscribers the first three months of this year. All told, there were nearly 53,000 Premier Agent subscribers at the end of March, up 56 percent from a year ago. Those subscribers are paying on average $286 a month for the service. Three tiers of service are available Premier Agent Gold, Silver, and Platinum. While the number of subscribers has increased, monthly cost for the premier levels remains the same as last year. At $39 per month, the Gold level includes 10 monthly featured listings, while Silver costs $79 for 25 monthly featured listings and Platinum starts at $128 for 50 featured listings.

Similarly, there are three membership levels within Trulia Pro that provide for exclusivity on listings, meaning advertising from other agents or brokers doesn’t appear on that listing. Fees range from a basic membership of $29.99 a month for one featured listing to the deluxe level of $79.99 monthly for 10 featured listings. Both the price and the number of featured listings has changed from 2013, when subscribers could get 10 featured listings each month for $39.99, 24 featured listings for $79.99 a month or 50 featured listings for $149.99.

According to Trulia, the company has about 66,700 subscribers, each paying on average $196 per month. But the company does not break out its subscribers by product. The 66,700 figure includes subscribers with a paid product, not those who submit listings for free.

Realtor.com’s Showcase Listings subscriptions allow agents to post up to 36 photos with each property, full-motion video and open house alerts. The site offers agents a list of free training sessions to learn how to use the realtor.com’s features to their fullest potential. Sessions are available via live webinars, live “in person” training, video step-by-step, online and downloads. Realtor.com is the only one of the three that receives its listing information from a direct feed from real estate association’s MLS data. Realtor.com has one of the best online lead generation programs in TigerLead, and its touch screen mobile app technology gives it the advantage over the mobile apps of Zillow and Trulia.

Basically, agents are paying for subscriptions in order to “protect” their listings, keeping them higher in the search results and fending off competitive advertising and agents, according to Ken Shuman, vice president of communications for Trulia. Most large brokerages pay to have listings featured for their agents and to make sure they are controlling where the inquiries go.

“If your broker is paying to have the enhancement, check where the leads are going,” Dollinger says, because the individual paying for enhancements is deciding on where the leads are routed. “If your broker isn’t featuring your listings, or you’re not getting leads from online inquiries, I would pay to have those listings online, especially really good listings.”

Mike Zapart, a RE/MAX City agent, spends $350 a month on a Premier Agent subscription with Zillow and $40 a month with Trulia, and has done so since 2010. For that price, he gets to advertise himself across three ZIP codes. He also makes use of realtor.com’s standard package provided by his agency.

Zapart once had a more expensive subscription with Trulia, but he saw fees doubling every six months and decided to funnel most of his marketing budget to one site. “I decided to focus on Zillow because I was getting better leads and more return on my money,” Zapart says, noting he’s had 16 closings in 24 months from Zillow leads and five closings from Trulia leads. No leads from realtor.com have led him to any closings.

One aspect Zapart particularly likes about his Zillow Premier Agent subscription is the co-marketing option. “It allows you to have a lender marketing partner,” he says, adding that the lender covers $110 of his $350 monthly fee. “Any leads I get from my ZIP codes, she gets notified as well.”

He also likes the rental listing options on both Zillow and Trulia. Zillow partnered with a company called Postlets, which allows for free online rental and for sale listings. The free listings are pushed to Postlets’ 25 syndication partners at no charge. The free agent websites and access to customer reviews on Zillow are also selling points for Zapart, who routinely suggests potential clients read his reviews. Trulia has a similar feature, though they refer to them as “recommendations” rather than reviews. Realtor.com does not appear to offer agent reviews.

What Zapart didn’t like about Trulia was the sense of urgency that their system created for him. When a searcher clicked to get more information, the message was sent to three agents in the ZIP code. “It was a rat race, and you had to be pretty quick,” he says. It was also confusing for buyers to get responses from more than one agent from Trulia. Several times when Zapart arrived for a scheduled appointment with a potential client, that person showed up with a different agent from Trulia.