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To get the highest price possible for my home, I want as many prospective home buyers as possible to know that it's being offered for sale. To this end, my real estate broker held an opening Thursday for other brokers in the hope that they would see the house and then bring their clients back for the opening a few days later.
Aside from brokers telling their clients about the house, there were print advertisments in the local newspapers announcing the fact that the home was open this weekend. This is particularly important to reach prospective buyers that haven't yet chosen a real estate broker. The listing is also currently being displayed on a few of the local real estate brokerage companies' Web sites.
But, for me, that's still not enough. To achieve maximum exposure, I want to announce in all the relevant places on the Web that the home is available for purchase. The first stop is MLS, the multiple listing service that has the most listings. Unfortunately, it's not user-friendly. Realtor.com provides the same data and has a better user interface, but lacks basic functionality such as mapping.
So, my next stop was Craig's List. Sure, it's not really used for big ticket items, but I wanted the home listed in the Homes For Sale section so it would show up on HousingMaps.com, a Web site that collects data from Craig's List and displays it graphically on a map. It's a one-person project and while it's not complex, HousingMaps does show what someone can do without venture capital or angel financing. If the proprietor could figure out how to scrape data from real estate brokerage sites, he could really build something with potential.
Another place I wanted the listing to appear was Trulia, an online real estate information company that raised about $8 million in funding from Accel Partner earlier this year. It's another map-based service that allows you to search for available homes. While offering much more functionality than HousingMaps.com, Trulia's biggest edge is its partnerships with real estate brokerage companies that allows the startup to pull data from many sites in order to redisplay it on a map in an easy to digest and attractive user interface. Trulia automatically picked up my home listing straight from my real estate brokerage company's Web site.
This is how real estate listings should be displayed. They should all be in the same place. I shouldn't have to go to one site to see the listings on Craig's List, another to see the Remax ones and another to see the ForSaleByOwner.com ones.
Also, listings should be displayed on a map rather just in a text format. It's all about location, after all. And what better way to determine your interest in a house than in looking at it on a map. From there, you should be able to get further details by looking at satellite views or an even more robust Bird's Eye View provided by Microsoft.
Trulia is the best of the bunch but it isn't perfect. It doesn't update its listing often enough so listings that have sold or been pulled from the market remain months after they should have been removed. And if the San Francisco-based startup really wants to create the comprehensive online real estate directory, they also must deal with incorporating listing data from outside the real estate brokerage community from places such as Craig's List, FSBO.com or just individual users. Would allowing individual users to manually enter in their listings conflict too much with their real estate brokerage partners?
The final place I went was Google Base. It's a real mess right now. I was able to easily add my home listing in, but there isn't enough structure to the listing type, geographical search or listing source to easily find it again. When I searched by the name of the town one time, I came up with my home listing, but with information provided by a real estate company. The listing I manually entered was nowhere to be found. I guess some exposure on Google is better than none.
I will continue providing ongoing updates about my use of online real estate tools as my home selling process progresses. I'm hoping this experience will help venture capitalists get a better understanding of how new technology is affecting the $60 billion real estate market and whether current startups are addressing users' needs.
Tags: trulia, google, realestate, accelpartners, housingmaps, vc, venture capital
Thanks for your question, Ed. The answer is no. Her 5% fee didn't cover the syndication service;) Trulia seems to pick up listings from certain real estate firms, including the one representing me. Some brokers also seem to be adding their listings into Google Base. I added it to Google Base and Craig's List myself.
I hear you on decayed listings. This is a problem offline as well. Almost every "for sale" sign in philadelphia is on a house that was already sold. Additionally, they dont have unique numbers on the signs so you have to write the address down to refer them to the house in interest.
There's another site that does this type of thing:
http://www.jolocate.com/Listings.aspx
I like it better
I use point 2 agent and it syndicates to about 12 sites including Trulia, Google Base, Craigslist with a liitle and more sites. Here is a link to check it out: http://www.dowelltaggart.com/ForAgents.aspx
I do submit my listings to a lot of the national sites but a high percentage of the buyers are looking on local real estate brokerage sites that is why a local MLS is by far the #1 tool expose a home to the most amount of buyers. It is up to the company sites to ensure user friendly-ness.
Another interesting site to note is
This site combines google maps, with state-of-the-art web technologies and lets users easily create and search for map ads...
Did your real estate broker help syndicate your listing to the various online search sites, or did you have to do that yourself?