Sellsius real estate marketing blog

@brandongreen

Totally agree. What is interesting is the #1 reason REALTORS give to for sale by owners to use an agent is because they over price or under price their homes and are leaving money on the table.

If that is the case & you are a home buyer, than you MUST look at FSBO's if you want to possibly find a good under priced deal. You should want your buyers agent to help you find these good deals.

Remember that the NAR itself claims that 8-20% (dependant on year) of successfull home sales are FSBO's. So all real estate sites are missing a minimum of 8% of inventory... if a city has 100 homes for sale, that means homes buyers depending on just MLS sites may miss 8 of the best (or worst) priced deals in their area.

@Gainsville Real Estate
Regarding your quote about Retrove.com being just an "aggregator of real estate site pages" isn't Google an aggregator of web pages, so if Google is a true search engine than Joe’s statements that we are a true “real estate search engine” is fact.

@ Laurie Manny... in fact, there are individual agents sites listed in Retrove, as well as local MLS sites, FSBO, HUD, Bank REO inventory sites, etc.

The issue is the majority of individual agent sites don't have a crawl able site architecture, just like yours. If they did... Trulia would probably have never been created.

I'm assuming that you searched for “Long Beach real estate” and found that you were not listed on the first pages like your site is on Google.

The reason why your site (and many other real estate agent & broker sites) don’t appear on the first page of results is that it uses an iframed MLS search from 1parkplace which makes it impossible to crawl to return localized search results or the individual listings. Even Google does not crawl your MLS search.

Your iframed search results from 1parkplace come from either of the two local multiple listing service IMRMLS or SoCalMLS (which both share same exact data currently) which is in fact included on the first page of our search results. So in one click on retrove.com on the MLS you will see the same thing that takes 6 clicks for the users of your site. In comparison on Retrove with the same 6 clicks they could have seen 60+ listings on 6 different websites.

The issue we solve is in the discovery of listing sources as well as a time saving tool just like a traditional search engine. Currently home buyers must first search to find each real estate site, on each domain they use then re-enter the same city and zip for each individual site, which is a complete waste of time.

Do that 3-4 times a week on 4-8 real estate sites over 90 days and you will have spent a ton of time just trying to get to the listings you want to see.

With our search, you only enter the city once and we localize all of the results across all of the sites in the area, saving users an incredible amount of time. If a home buyer wants to search down to a zip code, they can do that and again, we will localize all of our search results for just that zip code. Retrove also allows users to discover real estate listing sources they may not have been aware of in the past or able to find on Google.

So going back to a real estate search in say Long Beach, CA 90814... our first page results include: http://www.retrove.com/CA/Long_Beach/90814/

- IMRMLS (the local direct MLS - which contains the majority of listings)
- REALTOR (in case there are out of area agents posting listings in their local board only which would not appear on the local MLS)
- HUD Homes
- Craigslist
- Tribune newspaper

... to name a few but also the same search returns without any additional user input there is a list of all of the local agents & offices in Long Beach with phone numbers & addresses.

Additionally in the same search results there is also links to all important community information, such as local tax assessors, schools, county sites, loan limits, etc. Once again a massive time saver.

So with that said, you may be upset that your site does not appear in the top search results like you have been able to achieve with Google but that fact does not make retrove.com a POC as you describe.

You may know from your personal experience as a REALTOR or from reading the annual NAR Home Buyers Survey.. the majority of home buyers are searching multiple real estate sites as they are know that there is not a single RE site that has all of the listings available in an area. Even the local MLS are missing a minimum of 8-12% of homes for sale which is the successful FSBO’s. Additionally in home buyer survey’s most home buyers want to talk to the listing agent directly and local REALTOR sites like yours don’t offer that opportunity.

Retrove is built for the consumer to find all possible listings & local community information in the least amount of time in the least amount of clicks.

What I would be interested to know if all other RE sites are crap and you had all of the money & technology in the world… how would you build the perfect consumer website?

But then we've always known this about Trulia, haven't we?

True. The professionals know. It is the consumer who doesn't.

Just checked out Retrove. Another piece of crap! Only lists aggregator, broker and news sites with listings. Not an individual agent site in the first 4 pages (didn't bother going deeper).

Joe - If you click on the postlets.com link on the Trulia "listing" you're led here: http://www.postlets.com/res/2682746

The "agent", Kim Sheley, is not listed as an agent in the Arizona Dept of Real Estate Database. She appears to work for mhchomes.com -- Equity Lifestyle Properties -- which is NOT a real estate brokerage, but a REIT (Real Estate Investment Trust) which has a "portfolio" of of resort communities in the US. (I'll refrain form making a comment about how a mobile home qualifies as a "resort" property)

So it's not really a FSBO (unless the REIT owns the property -- I can't tell). But it would seem to at least not quite meet the "spirit" of this FAQ posted on Trulia: http://www.phoenixrealestateguy.com/TruliaNoFSB... t-- which clearly states FSBOs are not accepted and an owner has to be working with an AGENT to list their property on Trulia.

And the sign in the yard is clearly a "For Sale by Owner" sign.

Thanks for the info/links, Jay.

Looking at their TOU, I could not find any express prohibition against FSBOs and there may be some doublespeak at work, since Trulia may want to make it appear they won't allow FSBOs-- I wonder what the penalty would be if they found one-- would they remove it? I doubt it. Who knows? And they probably won't say.

Since Trulia accepts listings from syndicators like Postlets, FSBOs may be able to slip in the back door & I dont see any mechanism on Trulia to ID FSBOs for exclusion.

Also, Trulia "Listing Content" comes from crawling submitted sites, some of which may contain FSBOS. Can they say they don't crawl sites that have FSBOs?

Perhaps the green men know about FSBOs getting in and would not remove them --- so they dont police it.

I don't care either way.

But I used the issue to back into the thing that upsets my sense of consumer fairness-- saying you are a search engine (implying web wide) when, IMO, you only search the listings you have permission to search. So, if their policy is no FSBOs , they can't be a real estate vertical search engine. Plus, they don't have every MLS. Someone ought to expose them on their search engine "advertising".

I've never heard of Retrove until you wrote this - but it's still not exactly a "real estate search." It's an aggregator of real estate site pages. I'm waiting for the day there is a comprehensive site with a single page for each physical home address that is accurate.

The part I find objectionable is that Trulia calls itself a real estate "search engine" when it isn't-- in the way most people understand a search engine (read Google). IMO this is misleading to consumers. Even if you consider vertical search, it isn't since it does not access all MLS and FSBO listings-- it can only search listing sites it has permission to search. I am curious to know if it crawls any FSBO sites.

Very interesting conclusion--I know a lot of people would agree with you. There are some good listings that are FSBO.