Mar. 23, 2007: Realty.bots will make home sellers happy
We talked last week about the move by Realogy Inc. to supply millions of real estate listings from its national brokerage chains to upstart Realty.bots Google Base and Trulia.com. This puts the Realty.bots on the map. Who else is affected?
Sellers should be happy. Realty.bots are really not effective real estate search tools, but they are excellent home shopping sites. Listed homes will be exposed to thousands of users who might not have seen them on Realtor.com or local brokers' Web sites.
Buyers could be happy. Trulia.com can seem like the Disneyland of real estate: Bright colors, interactive maps, even a Google Earth interface.
But buyers might stop to reflect that a Realty.bot listing is not very different from an exclusive listing. My wife and business partner, Cathleen Collins, was out with a buyer who saw an "exclusive" sign and asked what it meant. Her answer was concise and stingingly accurate: "It means they don't want you to have representation."
In fact, Realty.bot listings normally are not exclusive listings. They just look like it. When you click through for information, you are contacting the listing agent directly -- or the listing brokerage or brokerage chain. If you proceed with the purchase of that home, you will either be unrepresented or you will be represented by the listing broker. You will not have your own buyer's agent.
Realtors probably should be unhappy with Realogy's move. Realty.bots tend to cut buyer's agents out of the transaction altogether. This won't save the buyer any money. The listing broker will just get paid double.
But listers also have cause to be unhappy, because the listings Realogy is providing to the Realty.bots will click back to Realogy, not to the listing agent or brokerage. My thinking is that their plan is to sell listers the leads their own listings generate.
It's a brave new world in real estate. It will be fun to see how this plays out.
Greg Swann is the designated broker for BloodhoundRealty.com, a full-service Metropolitan Phoenix real estate brokerage. This article originally appeared in the West Valley regional sections of the Arizona Republic.
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