Trulia distributes listings to media free
Today, Trulia announces their publishing platform that can essentially place Trulia's feature tools - the heat maps and listings/comps data - on any site. I'm particularly focused on their partnership with publishers Kiplinger.com, Village Voice Media and AmericanTowns to facilitate the creation of co-branded sites that display on the publishers' sites. And it's all for free.
The offering takes one further step towards commoditizing listings data and making them free. It takes dead aim at the third party vendors like Homescape that provision listings data for publishers and charges them for it.
Since no monetization is involved, what are the benefits to each party?
- Benefits for publisher - free listings content
- Benefits to brokerage partners and their listings agent - broader listings distribution
- Benefits to Trulia -
Trulia
further positions itself as a national listings distributor. In
particular, these content distribution agreements get their consumers
comfortable with Trulia's look and feel, its application functionality
and its tool sets. Trulia takes a page out of Google, eBay and Amazon's
book by insinuating their real estate search methodology to the
consumer and keeps them returning out of habit.
Although the Trulia agreement with publishers looks similar to Zillow's newspaper agreement, the difference is where the listings are placed or advertised. In Trulia's case, listings are on the media publishers' sites; in Zillow's case, the publishers' listings are supplementarily advertised on Zillow's site.
Interestingly, Trulia and Zillow have so far signed up separate newspaper publisher partners, so there's no chance a Trulia listing on a newspaper publisher also gets posted as an ad on Zillow.
What an aggressive move by trulia. A good move to, I like to see healthy competition among large corporations, they really have the ability to offer great services, they just have to be pushed into it.
Reply to this
This is a far better concept than implementation. The problem today is that Trulia's listings are still minimal when compared to other sources. Imagine a phone directory with just a handful of phone numbers -- how long would you continue to check it?
When Trulia's listings begin to approach critical mass, then they (and their partners/affiliates) have something valuable to offer. The risk they face by making that offer today is eroding the credibility of their syndication partners in the eyes of website visitors.
At the end of the day, the general public rarely gives high marks to conceptual achievement -- they just want to know where the value lies.
Reply to this
You're assuming that the general public understands that Trulia's listings are not as comprehensive as the local MLS.... but they don't know this. They don't exactly know where the "value" lies and if Kiplinger says these are the real estate listings (even if they are from Trulia), then for all intents and purposes to the consumer, they are real estate listings because Kiplinger says so.
If online media publications just want to display listings on their real estate site and want to do it for free with Trulia, the tradeoff is not showing as many listings in order to save $10,000's. That's the value prop.
Reply to this
People will understand that Trulia's listings are on the thin side when they compare them with the # of listings on their MLS website or realtor.com...or whichever site they visit after visiting Kiplinger or one of Trulia's other partners. They won't worry about WHY there are fewer listings, they just won't go back.
The value prop to online media outlets looking to display real estate listings is somewhat obvious. In my comment, I was referring to the level of value that the site visitor would assign to this endeavor.
Prospective home buyers and sellers are looking at more than a single online media source for information. If one of these resources is judged "thin" relative to the others, those buyers and sellers won't be back. Once again, it's like looking at a stack of phone books covering the same area and one of them has far fewer pages than the others -- how often would you reach for that resource?
Trulia's concept is great. It's implementation isn't yet ready for prime-time.
Reply to this
I see your point... Trulia is merely positioning itself to build a more comprehensive prime time product some time in the future.
Reply to this
In principle, the merging of Trulia with these companies can be a very good thing.
But don't you think that this will 'be too quick too fast' for Trulia? And wouldn't this affect service provided?
Reply to this
Pete Flint, Trulia's CEO mentioned last night that it would take only 2-3 extra servers for the extra demand.
According to Techcrunch, Trulia's traffic has reached Zillow's level
Reply to this
It's not accurate to say "there's no monetization involved." The publishers are running ads on these sites, and Trulia reserves some of the ad inventory for itself, so both parties are generating revenue.
However, the big win for Trulia is the extra traffic they get to count. All of the publisher sites are being served from the Trulia.com domain, which means it gets to count that traffic for themselves. I wouldn't be surprised to see Trulia surpassing Zillow in traffic over the next few months as a result of this program, assuming enough publishers sign up.
Reply to this