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Sami Inkinen, co-founder of Trulia, has written a blogpost about the future of syndication where he raises some important questions about where the real estate industry is headed with distribution of listings:
Now that listing syndication has become a mainstream practice and “syndication sites” like Trulia have grown to serve millions of users, an old question has raised its head again, namely: Is syndication good or bad for me as a real estate broker?
In many recent conversations with brokers and industry leaders, it is clear to me that some people are frustrated and concerned with the direction of listing syndication. (Emphasis in original)
Sami goes on to make a number of points that ultimately fail to answer the question he posed, and further fails to support the conclusion he draws. Nonetheless, given the importance of Trulia to the industry, and the importance of Sami within the company, I think it’s worth reading the whole thing. (Note, you will need to skip over some of the more salesy aspect of the post and focus on the points Sami is making, rather than the promotion of Trulia and its products….) I’ll be here, after the jump.
Read the rest of this entry »
Six years ago, Trulia started the new era of online real estate marketing by introducing listing syndication to brokers across the country. This unique type of listing syndication allowed listing brokers and agents to selectively market their own listings to a broader online audience and receive the related leads - typically for free.
What distinguishes Trulia from the thousands of IDX listing websites run by brokers, agents and various third-party sites is that the actual listing broker or agent is the originator and representative of the listing on Trulia.com
Now that listing syndication has become a mainstream practice and “syndication sites” like Trulia have grown to serve millions of users, an old question has raised its head again, namely: Is syndication good or bad for me as a real estate broker?
In many recent conversations with brokers and industry leaders, it is clear to me that some people are frustrated and concerned with the direction of listing syndication.
At Trulia, we have operated under a consistent set of principles specifically designed to balance the needs of the industry and consumers since 2005. Pete and I founded Trulia with a focused mission to revolutionize real estate search and empower individuals to make smarter decisions. Our key promise was the following:
The uncertainty around listing syndication that I’ve heard involves three concerns:
What is the value from listing syndication?
Your listings now reach millions of unique prospective buyers for free on Trulia alone:
Access to this kind of audience for free is a pretty good arrangement that’s hard to find anywhere else. Instead of paying thousands of dollars to newspapers and other print media to distribute your listings or giving up half of your commission to another company, syndicating to sites like Trulia gives you practically free access to millions of active homebuyers. We think this is a pretty good deal. Not only do you get free access to these customers, but now you can track and measure the results of every media dollar. For instance, you can target your marketing towards specific ZIP codes or cities while tracking every lead until it becomes a completed transaction. No other medium - not even other online services - can do this.
Moreover, in most markets, you can buy a year of upgrades and premium advertising on Trulia for the price of a one-page ad in your local newspaper. I would argue that even a one page newspaper ad is still a waste of marketing money on a medium that doesn’t deliver the kind of return that online - especially those with listing syndication - can offer.
Consumers have clearly voted in favor of syndication sites based on their behavior. In addition to broker and agent websites, many want to conduct research on non-industry, consumer-facing sites. So from all the signs that I can see, I believe that the importance and value of listing syndication as a marketing activity for brokers and agents will only increase in the coming months and years.
How to ensure control over data and quality?
Industry leading brokers have started to move over to direct syndication and I predict this shift will become a widespread trend. Large brokers - those with their own internal IT capabilities - are eliminating middleware such as Threewide and Point2 because of the increased control and visibility that results from direct relationships with sites like Trulia.
While I predict listing syndication will grow in importance, I also believe that the number of “syndication sites” will go down dramatically in the next year or two. Many brokers initially endorsed the view of “syndicate everywhere” and sent their listings to 30 or more websites thinking “more is better,” but now I see the opposite happening for several reasons. Many of the smaller syndication sites simply have no value to deliver or they are faced with a high overhead trying to manage their broker relationships. For example, one of the larger online sites, Roost, recently pivoted its business model while many others are still struggling to keep the lights on without a large-scale audience. I think Brokers will continue this trend of “syndicate selectively” to a few sites so they can control their listing assets. I also believe they should apply selection criteria in choosing these sites based on what delivers the best value for their business, i.e., large audience, quality audience, control of your data.
How do I protect my leads?
Perhaps the loudest negative feedback we hear is about sites, including Trulia, that allow agents to receive leads on or near another broker’s or agent’s listing. On Trulia, this feature is called QuickConnect, which also allows consumers to connect with buyer agents. I can’t speak for other sites, but I want to clarify the Trulia approach and how we have remained true to our principles of delivering for both consumers and the industry.
The reason why we introduced QuickConnect is to ensure a great customer experience AND to provide more leads to agents. In addition to making it easy to connect with the listing agent, we want to make sure end users are getting a response from an agent (since nearly 70 percent of leads don’t get an agent response) and have the option to speak with a buyer agent. Plus, we also know that agents can never get enough leads.
Since we launched QuickConnect, leads to both listing agents and other agents have increased by 40 percent. In just about every market, leads have increased. In no case did leads to listing agents decrease as a result of QuickConnect.
Despite those results, we wanted to deliver on our principle of freedom and control, so we have provided two alternative options for listing brokers:
Delighting both consumers and the industry can be a challenge, but creating and working hard to maintain this balance is what makes Trulia different from other sites.
Share your thoughts with us: Our Actions Are Driven By Your Feedback
Being customer obsessed is one of Trulia’s core values so I invite you to engage with us in an ongoing dialogue! Tell us what you think - the good and the bad.
Trulia was the first among our peers to create advisory boards with brokers, franchisors and MLS’s that represent a mix of different sized companies. During these industry meetings, we openly discuss our product ideas and future plans so that we get your feedback on our designs, thoughts and innovation. We also gather customer feedback in our usability lab and via our hundreds of meetings with individual brokers that we conduct each year.
Join us in this dialogue and we’ll work side by side towards achieving mutual success. Georg and I will be reaching out to many of you in the coming months. Or drop us a line at georg@trulia.com or sami@trulia.com to share what’s on your mind.
A lot of content on the Web today is syndicated across multiple sites. For Google News, that's a problem, as the service has to determine which one of these sources to pick as a headline. Today, Google introduced two new metatags that allow publishers to give "credit where credit is due," as the company puts it, and highlight original sources and indicate when something is a syndicated copy. Google will use this information to rank stories on Google News.
The two new tags that Google introduced today are syndication-source and original-source. The syndication-source tag can be used to indicate the location of the original story. The original-source tag should be used to highlight the URL of "the first article to report a story." A story that uses material from a variety of original sources can include more than one original-source tags to point to these. Both of these tags can also point to the current page URL, so publishers can call attention to their own original reporting. You can find more details for how to implement these tags on your site here.
For now, Google still calls this an experiment is only using the syndication-source tag in its rankings to distinguish among groups of duplicate articles. The original-source is "only being studied" and doesn't factor into Google's rankings yet.
It is worth noting that the hNews microformat, which was developed by the Associated Press and the Media Standards Trust, already offers a similar functionality, including a tag for identifying the originating organization for a news story. According to Google, though, "the options currently in existence addressed different use cases or were insufficient to achieve our goals."
Can You Trust the Internet?
The problem with this system is that it is based on trust, as Search Engine Land's Matt McGee rightly notes. Nobody can stop a spammer from marking unlicensed copies of a story as original sources, for example. In it's FAQ for these tags, Google says that it will look out for potential abuse and either ignore the source tags from offending sites or completely remove them from Google News.
Read/Write Web today reports on an effort by Google to encourage web publishers to specify whether their content is original or syndicated. The problem focused on by Read/Write Web is that of Google News and how Google attributes the author of a story when it crawls the many syndicated copies out there:
The two new tags that Google introduced today are syndication-source and original-source. The syndication-source tag can be used to indicate the location of the original story. The original-source tag should be used to highlight the URL of “the first article to report a story.” A story that uses material from a variety of original sources can include more than one original-source tags to point to these. Both of these tags can also point to the current page URL, so publishers can call attention to their own original reporting. You can find more details for how to implement these tags on your site here.
For now, Google still calls this an experiment is only using the syndication-source tag in its rankings to distinguish among groups of duplicate articles. The original-source is “only being studied” and doesn’t factor into Google’s rankings yet.
Of course, duplicate listing content is a problem in the real estate space as well. Here are several questions:
- Should listing syndicators like ThreeWide (now owned Move, Inc.) and Point2 specify the original-source?
- What should be the original source?
- Does this also apply to IDX offerings?
- If IDX listings contain the original-source tag and point it back to the listing broker, should this reduce the need to disclose the broker name on summary reports as apparently is the case now for franchise sites using IDX listings?
- What other implications or uses do you see for these tags?
Categorized under: IDX,Syndication
