Brokers increasingly see a need to carve out a place for themselves on the portals, and are shifting their ad dollars and marketing focus toward luring consumers from portals to their own sites. But if the big brokers make their peace with the Zillow, Trulia and Realtor.com, will that leave smaller brokers out in the cold?
Most brokers still say it’s the traffic to their own sites that gives agents their best leads – often visitors to portal sites are still in the very early stages of their home search, and may be unwilling to commit to signing on with an agent. But as traffic to the portal sites has grown in the past several years, many brokers are coming to the conclusion that having a presence there as well as on their own sites is a necessity.
Last week, Connecticut-based Berkshire Hathaway Home Services New England Properties announced an exclusive deal with Realtor.com that will allow all of its agents’ listings to have “showcase” status, in which the brokerage’s branding and the listing agents’ name are more prominently featured, as well as allowing the listing to display more, higher-quality photos than the standard listing.
“We felt an obligation to do it,” said Candace Adams, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway Home Services. “We’ve carefully monitored the activities of consumers – where they’re going, how they’re going. We realized we need to be in a space where we can use Trulia, Zillow and Realtor.com as conduits to our own website,” she explained.
The portals are trying to make it easy for them, as well. Berkshire’s move is far from novel – Zillow.com announced a $1 million deal between it and large national broker Howard Hana in 2012 for the brokerage to have exclusive branding on its listings. But over the past several months, with the portal companies vying to seduce brokers into providing them with listing feeds, ad deals which offer a variety of enhancements are getting sweeter, and more and more brokers are signing on.
Investment advisory firm Citron Research, a prominent critic of Zillow and Trulia, published a report this summer which included leaded internal documents revealing that Zillow’s deal with Coldwell Banker allows NRT Agents to purchase exclusive “agent branding” on their listings for a flat fee of $175 – a figure that’s thousands less than it charges to independent agents who post an equivalent number of listings.
Coldwell views its ability to leverage its size into getting its agents superior pricing is a key advantage in agent recruitment, and in getting its listings in front of as many eyeballs as possible, said Todd Lamothe, the marketing director at Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage in New England.
“We have an enhanced listing package not only with Realtor.com but also with Trulia, Zillow, Yahoo Homes, AOL Real Estate, MSN Hot Pads and Homes.com as well,” said Lamothe. “Our agents’ listing are enhanced across all of these sites so that their listings come up sooner rather than later. We want potential clients contacting our listing agents as soon as possible.”
Personal Preference
Of course, achieving Coldwell’s wall-to-wall coverage may not be necessary to please agents. Al Becker, marketing director at South Shore-based Jack Conway, Realtor, has found that his agents often have very distinct preferences in terms of what sites they want to be on.
“Our company has a wide geographical area [that we cover]; within different areas you’ll have some people who swear by Trulia, and for others it’s gotta be Realtor.com,” he said. Jack Conway has had enhanced listing deals with Trulia for over five years, and with Realtor.com for nearly four, Becker said. So far Conway agents haven’t expressed any interest in a similar placement on Zillow.
If they do, however, he’ll be happy to put them there. Being responsive to the quickly shifting marketing landscape is a key part of how Conway helps provide value to its agents, Becker said, and that can be an advantage in recruiting.
“We feel like offering them Trulia at no cost and Realtor.com at a very small cost versus retail, we’re able to attract people who may have to pay for it in full at another company,” said Becker.
The resources that larger brokerages have to devote to getting their agents special treatment can be harder for smaller agencies to compete with. Angela Harkins, broker/owner of Angela Harkins & Assoc. in Westford, already pays for enhanced “showcase” status for her own listings on Realtor.com. But none of the other agents at her five-person shop do the same.
“I’ve always done it … right now [my agents] don’t, because I have most of the listings and they mostly work buyers,” she said. She sticks with Realtor.com partly because Realtor.com is not as expensive as Trulia or Zillow. “Every time I went to look at the ZIP codes I’d want, they’re already taken,” she said. “If they were available, I might do them.”
Email: csullivan@thewarrengroup.com
