What Does News Corps’ Purchase of Move.com Mean to Real Estate Agents & Consumers? More Online Competition

I have been preaching this since I started blogging about Real Estate: Real Estate and the web are a perfect marriage, a match made in heaven. Print advertising is great for branding and luxurious story-telling, but it cannot help you market homes effectively. It’s too old, too slow, too expensive. Online is where EVERYONE looks for real estate — to quote Tony Ruggeri of Republic Property Group when I asked if most of their clients came from the web:

“Show me a client that does NOT come from the web,” he challenged me.

I’ve spent a little time in Midland recently, and even people in West Texas are all over the internet looking for land.

The Zillow-Trulia merger shocked the real estate world, as agents wondered what was next. Would Zulia, with it’s huge audience, try to take over listings or become it’s own MLS? Was this the end of the agent as we know it?

The new checkmate of having a seasoned, sophisticated media company buy Move.com, which runs the “official” real estate listing site Realtor.com, is significant. For you consumers out there, Realtor.com is a national search site that is blessed by the National Association of Realtors and all the MLS organizations that belong to it. You can access it in a jiffy, on your phone or ipad. It’s not a sexy as Zillow and Trulia, but the data is more accurate. The data on Realtor.com comes directly from the MLSs who have the original data, so it is cleaner. Think of the Telephone Game: by the end of the line, the message is garbled. Zillow and Trulia are like the end of the telephone line. That’s why you usually do not see expired listings that get you all hot and bothered by a property, only to find out it’s no longer on the market.

The portals of Zillow and Trulia obtain data from the MLSs but through tangential sources. Many consumers, however, don’t care if the data is old or inaccurate — if the house is sold, they just go to the next one. They just want the data, pretty homes to flip through.

So the News Corps move means there will be more competition in online real estate, just as it seemed Zulia had cornered the world:

The online real estate category is going to get more competitive again, just as it seemed that Zillow might run away with it.

This is good for everyone — even, ironically, Zillow and Trulia, whose pending merger is still under review by the FTC. The argument that a combined Z and T will have unacceptable market power just got a lot weaker.

This from Brian Boero, whose company, 1000watt, was a Move.com consultant. Tom Horvath says  “the winner will be the one that has the best (most accurate and up-to-date) info and creates new and better content, apps and widgets to bring back the most repeat visitors. But in the end, none of these sites is worth much without good data and the people who control that data are the agents. Better be a friend of the agent or lookout!”

One thing I know from working in the media: readers are fickle. They bore and tire easily, and if you give a bored reader some new fresh content or fun widgets that are easy to use, informative and DEPENDABLE, they will jump ship toote suite.

Zillow and Trulia evolved into media companies, they didn’t start out that way at all. I think they discovered the power of pulling in eyeballs by entertaining with house porn. Which will greatly shape consumer behavior:

This deal, while big, is about companies that advertise homes, not sell them. And that may make you feel that this doesn’t really impact the agent on the street. And in the short term you’re probably right. But longer term, I think you’d be wrong.

News Corp buying Move, or Zillow buying Trulia, may seem like the distant dealings of rich people peddling ad impressions to Realtors, but these things shape how consumers touch, interact with and evaluate our industry in the digital world.

We have only just begun to see where that may lead us.