Comments on: Not only is Prudential rumored to be giving their…

By: The San Diego Home Blog » Blog Archive » Beating a path to the Front Door

Wed, 19 Mar 2008 12:31:30 +0000

[...] will now be sending listing information to HGTV’s Front Door site, about a 140,000 of them. Dustin Luther sees this as yet another wake-up call for NAR and Realtor.com to start some retooling or [...]

By: Dustin

Dustin — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 05:14:28 +0000

No doubt… And I’ve seen the stats that come off the backend of R.com stats and despite my discounting of R.com’s organic traffic, those popular keywords add up extremely fast.

By: andrewhillman

andrewhillman — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 03:18:48 +0000

I gotcha, i was not looking at long tail searches. just general keywords that are poular. Realtor is a pretty popular keyword.

By: Dustin

Dustin — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 03:02:37 +0000

@andrewhillman I’m not sure I’d agree that r.com gets amazing organic results. They do really well on a few key terms (like “real estate listings”), but add one more qualifier on there (like “seattle real estate listings” or “calabasas real estate listings”) and they are no where to be found.

If you just look at long-tail searches, (i.e. 95% of so of the real estate searches being done), my guess is that homegain, trulia, homes.com, etc are actually doing better than r.com.

And you’re right that NAR and Move are attached at the hip, but NAR actually owns the domain r.com, not Move. It’s just that Move has an irrevocable (assuming they meet some basic requirements), perpetual license to run the site for them.

By: andrewhillman

andrewhillman — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 02:00:54 +0000

Since realtor.com has amazing organic rankings and is in- bed with NAR because they own the domain that NAR was too slow to purchase back in the day, it will be very tough to loose significant market share. But they do to revamp the direction of the site.

By: Dustin

Dustin — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 23:24:19 +0000

Ed,

That would definitely change the dynamics around real estate search completely. I don’t think we’ll get there in the near future… and I actually think we’re more likely to see a fragmented situation with all the big search sites getting most of the listings, but none getting a comprehensive database to be useful to consumers by itself.

However, that really might be the best of all worlds for the typical agent/broker site if they remain the only ones with IDX access.

By: Ed Kohler

Ed Kohler — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 21:12:46 +0000

Will we reach a point where competition moves to the interfaces rather than listing inventory? That’s something to strive for.