Thinking of using the Internet for property search? What's your time worth and how much of it are you willing to spend online?

Every real estate agent in the world wants your eyeballs. It used to be that we wanted your ears - "Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears." Well not anymore, we want your eyes and we're spending lots of time and money to try and capture them for a few minutes.

Real Estate's presence on the Internet has been one of tremendous growth, hype, and controversy. It's been a wild ride and it ain't over yet!

In the past year or so, we have seen many Internet startups forming to try and capture some of the easy cash cow money falling off the real estate money tree. Alas, so many try, so few succeed. Perhaps, they miss the point that you must first bring value to the consumer or the agent before you seek profits.

Last year, we saw agents running scared of Zillow taking over the online real estate world. Today, most agents don't see Zillow so threatening. Why? - Zestimates. Zillow's property value estimates continue to so unreliable in so many markets that they have fallen victim to that worst of all fates - word of mouth marketing. Many homeowners are not liking what they read about their property on Zillow. But hey, Zillow's a great site for gathering information. Just remember to take along a grain of salt as you should to all sites you visit.

We find Trulia to be more consumer friendly than Zillow. Our point of contention with Trulia continues to be with Trulia Voices, a forum intended for consumers to pose questions to real estate agents. I continue to see more agents asking questions in the areas we serve, than consumers (we do see some improvement). It seems obvious that agents are doing this a a means of trying to leverage Trulia Voices to capture those eyeballs of yours. Not a bad strategy, but I don't think it would do much for our team image if I pose a question like one I saw from a thirty-year real estate veteran - Are the schools in Pleasanton any good? Wouldn't you expect a real estate agent that had lived in the area for thirty years to know a little something about the local schools?

Realtor.com is a fading star. Younger, sprier more consumer oriented business people are sticking it to this site representing the National Association of Realtors. Why? My opinion - the NAR is spending more time reacting than leading. They also suffer from what may be a fatal case of grandiosity and arrogance. You see this all the time in business - look at Yahoo! When you start dictating and protecting instead of listening and innovating - you're in trouble.

And now we have RottenNeighbor, a site where all the pissers, moaners, morons and fans of Jerry Springer can go to shoot themselves in the foot. Are people so stupid that they don't realize that bitching about their neighbors is going to hurt their property value? It's one thing to complain to your spouse it's another to bitch to 2 billion people about your neighbor's barking dog or yard maintenance habits. It's a sad state of affairs when people are so desperate for attention that they will make public fools of themselves for a fleeting moment of - again - getting your eyeballs.

Buyers interested in locating accurate property information need access to their local MLS. This is where you get the changes as they happen, not 48 hours later or next week or never.

Whether you gain access through a local real estate agent or some other means doesn't matter. What matters is that the MLS is the most accurate, most up-to-date source of information available on property for sale.

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