The future of real estate agents is a special cause of mine, since my wife is with Century 21. So whenever I hear that someone has bought or sold a house, I always ask them: “how was the agent experience? What did you do online?”
So when I saw (on Facebook) that my pal Gib Olander just bought a new house, I couldn’t resist asking him these questions. Gib, who runs business development at Localeze, is as search-centric as a human being can be. But here’s what he said, via email.
“We did use a full service agent, who is a long-time family friend with more than 30 years of real estate experience. If it weren’t for the fact that I had a relationship with her I would not have utilized an agent on the buying side of a real estate transaction. If there is ever an industry which needs to align themselves with search marketing, it is real estate.
My agent is a very successful and an experienced pro…yet I was consistently able to uncover information about the market I was interested in via search as or more quickly than she was able to provide it, now I understand that I am not the normal internet user, but I am sure that the next generation of home buyers will be just as adept at search as I am. I never once picked up a print publication to look for a home and I was in the market researching this community for six months.
From a buying and research perspective I used these sites.
Trulia is the most informative tool, just amazing information they really are doing a great job. Average price per square foot, comparable homes, school and community stats, quarterly buy and sell reports.
Realtor.com has the listings and a few tools but nothing really unique, their MLS listing database and pictures of homes are their bread and butter, I can’t imagine buying a home that wasn’t listed here.
Zillow – nice mapping but not that useful
Iggyshouse was useful in finding some new or off the beaten path listings
Craigslist was useful and they often had photo’s when no one else would.
I see the real-estate agent from a “buying” perspective going the way of the travel agent, they will still have a place in special circumstances or where the buyer doesn’t have the ability to negotiate a deal for themselves but unless they reinvent their value proposition I wouldn’t invest in their future.
From the selling a home perspective, I absolutely see the real-estate agent’s role as my homes – SEO expert.. I know, I need to step away from my search kool-aid and get a life. But really I want an agent that is going to make sure my house is found in and by all the ways possible when a buyer is doing their research, I want my listing to be optimized by the set of keywords that most people search. Build me a viral website, load it with pictures. You can keep your print ad.”
Here is a comment on Gib’s story from a friend of mine who didn’t want to be identified.
Your friend is right that you can often find a house on your own now without a realtor. But you definitely need a buyers agent to negotiate the transaction and follow through on all the details once you find the house you want. As you know, we thought we could buy without a buyers agent and ended up at the mercy of the sellers agent. We paid too much for our first house and couldn’t get any of the repairs or finishing touches done that were promised to us. With our buyers agent in Virginia, we found the house, but she got us $10,000 in closing costs and a new washer/dryer (when the owners moved out and took theirs after promising it to us in the contract). She was diligent and looked at the house carefully. Her knowhow saved us money, and time and trouble. Finding a house is only the beginning of the process!
Gib,
Great to hear your perspectives. We’re honored.
Overall, we are just at the very early stages of where we want to take the product and think we can do a much much better job and we’re making improvements every week. Keep on watching. Perhaps it is just that everyone else does a worse job that we do…?!
I would also love to hear about the experiences of some real users test driving some of the newer social tools in their real estate research. For example, ask a question or for advice at http://www.trulia.com/voices/ and on similar services at linkedin and Y! Answers. Would be great to see how the responses differed and how useful they were from any of the readers who are in the market.
Pete
As a search professional I’d have to say I agree with Gib in that Trulia has some cool features. But as a home owner who’s trying to sell I’d have to say I’m very disappointed. My 3 bedroom 2.5 bath is listed as a 2 bedroom 2 bath condo. And is being compared to such at the price I paid in 2002.
When I submitted a question through Trulia Voices on how to change my listing, I found out that as an end user I couldn’t. Trulia gets the data from someone else and that I needed to find the link on the details page (???) to where they get it and change it there. Can you tell me where they get their data?
It looks like my agent can submit her listings to Trulia, which should update my info. I’m curious to see how long the process takes.
Vickie
Hi Vickie,
I’m delighted you like the service and I apologize for the problems that you are experiencing.
The process is pretty fast and simple if you want to update the data with an active home for sale listing. You can find out more here: http://www.trulia.com/submit_listings/
Hopefully it should be pretty painless for your agent.
The data you are referring to we get from the county assessors, which we recognize is not always 100% correct. Hence we replace the comp. tool data and the data at the top with the active listing data when we have it. So submitting it should resolve this problem.
Dont hesitate to get in touch if there are any other issues. We’ll be updating the facility for users to correct the County Assessor data in the future for properties that are not for sale.
Best
Pete