Skeptics’ Corner

Some agents have determined that none of the real estate search portals are worth the investment. Broker Sheila Doyle of Baird & Warner said she’s been there, done that, having paid in past years a combined $8,000 annually to the three sites. Calling herself an “old school agent,” Doyle said she prospects for business herself and no longer feels it’s in her best interest to pay the websites to do something she’s already doing. She points out that after five or six years, realtor.com in particular “got extremely expensive.”

She stopped paying all of them about three years ago, saying she didn’t realize any return on investment in the form of solid leads. “Often, people looking into properties are already looking with an agent and doing research on their own,” she says. “I never made a sale through [one of the three websites]. Now, all three call me constantly about paying to put my listings up. My listings are already shown all over the place, so why should I pay to have my listings duplicated?”

Fortunately, she said, Baird & Warner places their agents’ listings on feeds everywhere, including the three sites being compared here. While she paid Trulia for a short time, she soon realized they were advertising her site on listings that didn’t belong to her. Both Trulia and Zillow advertised several other agents in addition to the listing agent for each property. Doyle, who typically carries about 20 listings, didn’t think that was the honest way to do things. She said Zillow still uses that practice but thinks Trulia gradually shifted to include only the listing agent with each property.

In a phone conversation with a Trulia representative last month, Doyle was informed that they’d sent 78 leads in the past, leads she says she never saw. Agents who don’t pay to have leads emailed directly to them have to navigate Trulia’s system to locate their leads, she says. “It’s a manual process, and it’s terrible for buyers if no one sees the lead and responds to them. And it’s terrible for me, because it looks like I’m ignoring people when I didn’t even know they were there.”

Another problem Doyle had with all three sites is the property estimate feature, such as Zillow’s Zestimate, calling it “inaccurate and very misleading.” Dollinger doesn’t believe an inaccurate estimate is a bad thing. “A lot of agents say the accuracy is terrible, but if a Zestimate was spot-on accurate, it could potentially take away some of the value provided by the agent,” he says. “As it stands now, an agent can deliver a CMA or market snapshot based on accurate MLS data and show that their knowledge of the local market is far greater than what can be provided by a third-party algorithm.”

Of the three portals, Doyle says, Zillow offers the most information for clients. For example, clients who need to rent won’t find many listings on her MLS, but Zillow offers a lot of rental listings. In a perfect world, however, syndication sites would operate in real time. Often, potential clients will call to inquire about something only to be told it’s already been rented or sold, maybe even months before. 

But statistics and reporting are available, especially from Zillow and Trulia. “You have to go in and look for it, but it gives stats on how many people looked at a listing, etc.,” Doyle says. Reports can also be sent to sellers to keep them updated on how much interest their listing has garnered, something both Doyle and Zapart favor.

“Sellers get to see how many views are generated on the site, and it shows you’re actively working on their behalf,” Zapart says.

Like Doyle, Carole Klein, an agent with City Point Realty, has paid in the past to use all three portals. “They helped me as a new Realtor. I used them early on during the crash and for a year or two after,” she says, noting she had “absolutely no results” from realtor.com. She has since cut back and currently spends about $900 a month on Zillow alone. “I’m spending enough right now, and don’t have money left in the budget to spend on anything else,” Klein adds.

Klein likes that, as a “Premier Agent,” she receives leads via both text and email. While Zillow has been expensive, it’s been worth it, she says, especially with regard to a particular ZIP code. However, at this time she doesn’t plan to renew her subscription again once it expires because of the cost.

She’s also used Trulia, but says she isn’t convinced of its value just yet. “I’ve had minor successes with it, and I’ve been working with it on a limited basis,” she says.

When asked about whether agents see a better value in one syndicator over the others, Dollinger replies, “It comes down to what day of the week you catch an agent on.  Some days Trulia is worthless and Zillow provides the best leads, and other days realtor.com has the most ready-to-act consumers.  It really depends on what they have seen results from lately.”

At the end of the day, most agents don’t calculate their return on investment when it comes to real estate search portal subscriptions, Dollinger says. Agents must ask themselves if they have the infrastructure in place to work online leads and convert them. “If an agent only has $1,000 a year to spend, I would suggest they spend it on another type of marketing…a lot of agents think they can spend $50 a month and get 100 times on their return. That’s just not the case. However, if they spend $2,000 a year on listing enhancements and they close one buyer or secure one listing – that more than covers their online spending.”

Nevertheless, the portals and their networked sites remain the most popular for online real estate searches, reported Inman News earlier this year. Zillow, Trulia and realtor.com alone accounted for 32.45 percent of all real estate–related online traffic from desktop computer users in February, up from 23.41 percent a year ago. However, both Zillow and Trulia report more than 50 percent of traffic to their sites comes from mobile devices. Whatever means they choose to make it happen, Zillow, Trulia and realtor.com remain focused on one thing in 2014: growing their audience market share. CA