Not only is Prudential rumored to be giving their…

listings to Trulia, but they just announced that they are giving all their listings to FrontDoor.

I can’t help but look at these announcements from the perspective of the Move team… And the fact that two large brokerages companies (Prudential and Realogy), representing a substantial portion of US listings, appear to have made the mental leap of faith that they are best off syndicating their listings as widely as possible, should serve as one of the clearest warning signs yet that the clock is ticking for realtor.com. My take is that Move and NAR will need to agree to do something interesting with realtor.com soon or risk loosing significant market share going forward.

(Prudential news via Joel)

7 responses

  1. Will we reach a point where competition moves to the interfaces rather than listing inventory? That’s something to strive for.

  2. Ed,

    That would definitely change the dynamics around real estate search completely. I don’t think we’ll get there in the near future… and I actually think we’re more likely to see a fragmented situation with all the big search sites getting most of the listings, but none getting a comprehensive database to be useful to consumers by itself.

    However, that really might be the best of all worlds for the typical agent/broker site if they remain the only ones with IDX access.

  3. andrewhillman Avatar
    andrewhillman

    Since realtor.com has amazing organic rankings and is in- bed with NAR because they own the domain that NAR was too slow to purchase back in the day, it will be very tough to loose significant market share. But they do to revamp the direction of the site.

  4. @andrewhillman I’m not sure I’d agree that r.com gets amazing organic results. They do really well on a few key terms (like “real estate listings”), but add one more qualifier on there (like “seattle real estate listings” or “calabasas real estate listings”) and they are no where to be found.

    If you just look at long-tail searches, (i.e. 95% of so of the real estate searches being done), my guess is that homegain, trulia, homes.com, etc are actually doing better than r.com.

    And you’re right that NAR and Move are attached at the hip, but NAR actually owns the domain r.com, not Move. It’s just that Move has an irrevocable (assuming they meet some basic requirements), perpetual license to run the site for them.

  5. andrewhillman Avatar
    andrewhillman

    I gotcha, i was not looking at long tail searches. just general keywords that are poular. Realtor is a pretty popular keyword.

  6. No doubt… And I’ve seen the stats that come off the backend of R.com stats and despite my discounting of R.com’s organic traffic, those popular keywords add up extremely fast.

  7. […] will now be sending listing information to HGTV’s Front Door site, about a 140,000 of them. Dustin Luther sees this as yet another wake-up call for NAR and Realtor.com to start some retooling or […]

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