lennie exert: Chicago Agent Magazine ? Blog Archive ? Zillow, Trulia and Realtor ...

Chris Haran, Coldwell Banker, Gold Coast

By Dan Provost

The October 2011 issue of Realtor Magazine reported that in September, Realtor.com had more than 50 million visits. During that same month, Zillow.com saw more than 28 million visits while Trulia.com had more than 21 million visits.

But which of these three big real estate sites matter the most to Chicago and suburban real estate agents who are promoting their listings and themselves? Which ones do agents and brokers say deliver the best leads? And which frustrate them the most?

Realtor.com
Kay Wirth, a broker with RE/MAX Unlimited Northwest in Crystal Lake, says that she advertises herself and her listings on Zillow, Trulia and Realtor.com. But of the three sites, she spends the most, in both dollars and attention, on Realtor.com.

Wirth pays for Showcase Listings on Realtor.com. With a Showcase listing, agents can post up to 25 photos on each of their Realtor.com listings. They can also add full-motion videos and open house alerts. Showcase Listings also come with multiple leads forms, making it easier for potential buyers to contact listing agents.

The enhanced service also allows Wirth to write longer descriptions of her properties. As she puts it, she could ?write a book? about each of her featured listings if she so desired. She pays $3,198 per year for enhancing 25 listings in an unlimited number of ZIP codes.

The Showcase Listings feature also makes it easier for potential buyers to find Wirth?s Realtor.com listings. If buyers, for instance, search Crystal Lake for homes for sale, Wirth?s listings will rotate at the top of the page.

Wirth believes in Realtor.com so much, she even spends extra money to place banner ads on the site advertising her services.

?I spend more of my advertising money on online vehicles than I do on print advertising,? Wirth said. ?And I spend a lot of that money on Realtor.com.?

Wirth does not pay extra for either Trulia Pro or Zillow Premier Agent, those sites? equivalents to Realtor.com?s enhanced listings. Instead, she places only free listings on those two sites.

There?s a simple reason for this: Realtor.com, as Wirth says, is the online listing site that brings in the most business. It?s also the site that attracts the most dedicated visitors, Wirth said. She pointed to statistics released by Realtor.com for November: visitors spent more than 276 million minutes searching homes on the site during that month. The average visitor spent 23.9 minutes on the site and viewed 26 pages.

Realtor.com also does a better job attracting international buyers, Wirth said. In November, Realtor.com captured 880,000 unique visits from inter-national consumers.

?The consumer typically goes to Realtor.com first,? she said. ?I do get quite a number of leads through Realtor.com. Realtor.com also pushes people toward my website. That is always helpful.?

Click here to view a PDF of the Realtor.com chart

The pricing for the enhanced listings offered by Zillow and Trulia is similar. Zillow Platinum, which allows agents to run 50 featured listings a month, costs $128 a month. The site?s Silver level, which allows for 25 monthly featured listings, costs $79, while its Basic level, with 10 monthly featured listings, costs $39 a month.

Trulia Pro also has three different levels. Its most expensive allows agents to post 50 featured listings a month and costs $149.99 every month. For $79.99, agents can post 24 featured listings a month. If they spend $39.99, they can post 10 featured listings.

It?s more difficult to determine the costs of Realtor.com?s featured listings, because the company charges different fees depending on a real estate agent?s market location and the number of listings this agent has. As Realtor.com explains on its site, traffic varies in different markets based on the number of potential homebuyers and sellers searching online. At the same time, the more listings that a real estate agent carries, the more circulation they receive on Realtor.com.

This website also offers monthly pricing to those agents who don?t want to pay for a full year of enhanced listings. Monthly pricing, though, does come with a 12 percent surcharge.

Chris Haran, marketing manager for the Chicago and Milwaukee offices of Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage, is a believer in the benefits of all three sites. Each Coldwell Banker brokerage, in fact, pays for all of its agents to have enhanced listings on Trulia, Zillow and Realtor.com.

It was especially important to secure the enhanced listings on Zillow and Trulia, Haran says, because when buyers do a home search on these two sites, the first results that come up are featured results, the listings of real estate agents and brokerages that have paid Zillow and Trulia to boost their residences to prime spots.

Those agents who don?t pay for the enhanced listings on these sites won?t receive nearly as many Zillow or Trulia views of these properties, Haran said.

?Last year we decided to provide enhanced listings for all of our agents. Every time agents place one of their listings on Trulia, Zillow or Realtor.com, they come up as enhanced listings,? Haran said. ?This made sense for us so that our listings could be seen and we could get leads coming in.?

The drop-off in views without the enhanced listings was dramatic on all three sites, Haran said.

Zillow also has an annoying quirk that can hurt agents who haven?t paid for enhanced listings on the site. When a buyer finds a listing on Zillow that isn?t enhanced, Zillow will recommend four different agents for that buyer to call. More often than not, Haran says, the actual listing agent isn?t one of those four agents?, which means the lead from that listing will not go to the listing agent.

?We saw that our competitors were showing up on our Zillow listings. That didn?t seem like a good deal to us,? Haran said. ?That?s why we pay for the enhanced listings for all of our agents, so our listing leads go back to our agents.?

Matt Dollinger, vice president of strategic development for @properties, said that his firm also pays for its agents to post enhanced listings on all three sites. Dollinger, too, said that this has had a positive impact on his company?s agents.

?By featuring our agents? listings, they show up ahead of those that aren?t enhanced. There?s a philosophy to this: how often does someone go to the 12th page of Google search results?? Dollinger said. ?It?s the same thing when people look through real estate listings. How often are they going to go to the 12th page of a listings??

Haran takes an analytical approach to the Trulia/Zillow/Realtor.com debate; he says that each site draws in a slightly different audience.

Realtor.com boasts a large built-in user base because it has been operating for so long, Haran said. Its association with the National Association of Realtors helps boost its credibility, and when consumers run a web search for real estate, Realtor.com always pops up high.

But Trulia and Zillow have carved out their own niches, Haran said. The two sites have captured the nation?s desire for celebrity news and sensational stories. The sites also run news stories that tend to be less fawning and more critical of the real estate industry, something that helps drive traffic to these sites.

As an example, Zillow recently ran a feature story that asked if Newt Gingrich?s ties to Freddie Mac could haunt him during the presidential race. It also featured stories on Joan Rivers? New York City apartment being re-listed and pop star Avril Lavigne selling her Bel Air mansion to Los Angeles Clippers star Chris Paul.

Dollinger agreed that each of the three sites has its own benefits.

Realtor.com is the only one of the three that gets its listing information from a direct feed from real estate association?s MLS data. Because of this, Realtor.com is updated every 15 minutes with new information.

?As far as factual information, Realtor.com is the standard,? Dollinger said.

Click here to view a PDF of the Zillow chart

But what about those agents with limited funds? What if an agent can only spend $500 a year for online marketing?

Haran says that $500 annually would get agents the baseline packages from any of the three sites. Of these three sites, Haran says, the highest quantity of leads, at least for Coldwell Banker, comes from Realtor.com, making it the apparent top choice for agents with limited budgets.

Dollinger says that he has heard from several agents frustrated with the much slower update times from Zillow and Trulia. It?s not unusual, Dollinger said, for buyers to ask agents why they haven?t toured a particular house that they?ve found on Zillow or Trulia. Often, agents have to tell their buyers that the house was actually sold two months ago. Trulia and Zillow, though, have yet taken down the listing.

Trulia and Zillow, though, do have their selling points in Dollinger?s eyes. Trulia is an extremely easy site for consumers to navigate. It provides a nice balance of neighborhood and property information without overloading its pages with advertising, Dollinger said. Because of this, consumers tend to find it easy to surf Trulia?s listings.

Zillow has an obsession with numbers and data that tends to attract like-minded consumers to its site, Dollinger added. The site?s popular and controversial Zestimates ? its estimates of a home?s current value ? are an example.

Lead Quality
Chris Pequet, a broker with Hinsdale?s Crawford Group Sotheby?s Realty, said that the leads coming from the three sites aren?t always solid, though she did say that the leads generated from Realtor.com tended to be the strongest.

The key to making a Trulia, Zillow or Realtor.com lead work lies in the follow-up, Pequet said. That?s something, of course, that holds true for all leads, whether they?re sent to agents from their brokerages, past clients or mortgage loan officers.

Online leads, though, have to be handled especially quickly, Pequet said. Visitors from Trulia, Zillow and Realtor.com expect agents to call them back quickly when they send these real estate professionals email messages, Pequet said.

?Everyone expects immediate gratification these days,? Pequet said. ?If they don?t hear from you soon, they?re calling someone else. I try to get back to people as quickly as I can. When I do get a call or email from one of my online listings, I get back to those people right away.?

Wirth describes the leads that she receives from all three sites as being like the cold calls she?d receive during her earlier days in the real estate business.

Real estate agents would take cold call leads when they?d sit in their offices and wait for consumers to call. Often, these consumers would be just starting to think about buying a home and only wanted to ask real estate agents a few quick questions. Other cold calls would come in from serious buyers or sellers who were ready to work with a real estate agent that day.

The same holds true for the leads that Wirth receives from Zillow, Realtor.com or Trulia: some come from buyers or sellers who are ready to make a move now or relatively soon, at least. Others come from consumers who aren?t ready to buy a home or sell their residences for at least a year. Like Pequet, Wirth says that the key to converting leads from Realtor.com, Trulia and Zillow is to respond to these leads quickly.

?A quick response is what the coNsumer is looking for,? Wirth said. ?We have had some good success with leads that came to us from the online sites, but some are better than others.?

Haran also said that he hasn?t seen much difference in the quality of leads from the three sites. He, too, admitted that the leads from all three sites could be, as he said, ?tricky things.?

He pointed to patience as the key to making online leads, whether from Trulia, Realtor.com or Zillow, work.

?In today?s economy, real estate agents are working to make money now,? Haran said. ?A lot of online leads, though, have a long incubation time. Some people have no problem filling out a lead form when they have a simple question and have no plan to buy for months. Agents have to be patient, and they have to be willing to give that information and stay in touch afterwards.?

This requires a good contact-management plan, Haran said. Again, this isn?t much different from how real estate agents turn any lead, online or offline, into future business.

?In our market, the amount of rentals has risen,? Haran said. ?The goal of following up on some of these online leads it to take these rentals and turn them into buyers in the next couple of years. That goal is crucial to the agents who want to stay in this business.?

The Data
But more importantly than working the leads, how can agents know whether the programs they are investing in are, in fact, good buys? How can they tell if it?s worth their money?

Unfortunately, contacting each site?s sales representatives for such information, such as how leads are tracked and how many clicks an ad generates, isn?t as easy as it sounds. Chicago Agent?s ultimate goal was to include this information in each chart we have within this story, which details what each website?s programs are and what they include for what price, but we ran into more trouble than we realized when checking prices per advertising package, number of ZIP codes and number of listings.

When comparing the three websites? advertising packages and what they offer agents (see our charts throughout this story), you?ll notice that the pricing, and what you get for that price, is similar ? but when you ask what you get for a specific ZIP code or the type of ad bought and shown within a purchased ZIP code, things start to get trickier, prices start to increase and answers aren?t as clear-cut.

When we tried to get tracking information for ads in each program offered by Zillow, Alison Paoli, a PR specialist with the company, told us it is virtually impossible to tell agents the average number of hits their ad will get depending on placement on Zillow ? this is because page views, as well as the market, are always changing.

?We are able to provide historical data on page views by ZIP code to agents directly, but since that number is always changing, we can?t provide you with a number that will be the same next month as it is today,? Paoli stated in an email. ?The market is very seasonal and subjective ? you cannot compare one ZIP code to another because they are all unique (in terms of) different types of homes, how many homes are on the market, and how many homes are in the ZIP code.?

What they do tell agents, when selling ad space and explaining the different programs Zillow offers, is the number of contacts varies based on factors such as agent reviews, the listing and the neighborhood. Therefore, they can?t tell agents any sort of averages when it comes to traffic or qualified vs. unqualified leads.

In addition, it can be hard to find information about prices and what you can get for certain programs. Realtor.com, for example, has a link to its programs at the very bottom of the task bar on the left side of the site, and in its ?For Realtors? section, there is not a clear explanation of what programs are offered through the website. For that, agents need to find the ?Realtor.com Support? page or the ?Solution Center? page, and click on the ?Product Support? or ?Products? tab at the top ? the site shows different products and programs depending on which page you?re on.

Click here to view a PDF of the Trulia chart

And pricing for all the sites is difficult to find ? calls about specific pricing per number of listings per ZIP code for Realtor.com and Trulia were not returned, and while we did speak to representatives from Zillow regarding price (and the prices are stated on Zillow.com), for the Premier Agent Platinum program, prices start at $128, but can increase depending on the purchased ZIP code or codes and number of listings.

If we can barely find out this information to report to you, we now realize how hard it must be for agents, who need to rely on test and measure methods to determine if a website?s program is worth its return on investment ? and agents can only do this after purchasing a program and actively advertising with it for a year.

This seems to be the one caveat with Zillow, Trulia and Realtor.com?s advertising programs ? as far as actual data and statistics are concerned, the sites can?t provide any evidence that they are worth an agent?s advertising dollars. However, these sites are clearly working for many agents, and those agents will tell you which site is most worth their investment.

Mobile
Zillow, Realtor.com and Trulia all offer their own mobile apps today. This is important as a growing number of consumers are browsing home listings through their smartphones and tablet computers.

And these mobile users are more likely to contact agents than are visitors who come to the online sites from desktops or laptops. According to a recent story on Inman News, visitors who come to Realtor.com from their iPad devices are 160 percent more likely to call real estate agents, while those who come from iPhones are 300 percent more likely to do so.

While Haran wouldn?t say he necesarily has a personal favorite among Realtor.com, Trulia and Zillow, he did say he preferred Realtor.com?s mobile application.

?Realtor.com really distinguishes itself with its mobile apps,? Haran said. ?Realtor.com uses touch-screen technology to make its apps stand apart from the website.?

Dollinger, too, said that he couldn?t pick a leader, necessarily, among the three listing sites. He credited Realtor.com with having some of the best mobile apps he?s seen from a real estate site, Trulia for having the most intuitive ? and slickest ? interface and Zillow for having the most data.

?I know that?s a pretty politically correct answer, but it?s true,? Dollinger said. ?Each of the sites has its own strong points. That?s one of the reasons why it makes sense for agents to use them all.?

Chris Haran
Marketing Manager
Coldwell Banker, Northbrook
847.313.6753
chris.haran@cbexchange.com