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.

Related Posts:

• Trulia Voices - Another Platform for Narcissism?
• How to Waste YOUR Money Selling YOUR Home
• Buyer’s Best Friend

Online narcissism seems to be replacing free food and wine as the number one draw for agent participation. Is Trulia Voices doomed to become just another real estate agent schmooze fest?

It appears that what started out as a great idea on Trulia – Trulia Voices, a venue for the real estate consumer to pose questions to real estate professionals – is becoming just another venue for real estate agents to pose questions to each other in hopes of getting their names in front each other and the Google search engine.

I’ve been following Trulia Voices for some time and I’ve noticed, more and more, that 80% to 90% of the questions being asked seem to come from real estate agents not the consumer. In looking at Trulia Voices home page this morning, there were only two out of 15 entries that came from consumers. It's a shame, I thought Trulia had a great idea, but the situation seems to be an example of how online customers can morph a venue to their needs not business' intent. In this case, it's obvious that the majority of Trulia Voices customers are real estate agents, not consumers.

Will Trulia be able to return Voices to it’s original intent or do they even care? All entries, regardless of who posts them, help to build content on Trulia which helps Trulia build dominance on the search engines. The agents seem to be happy spending their time schmoozing with each other, asking questions they already know the answers to – so why change anything?

If you’re a consumer reading this and you want a serious answer to a serious question in regards to real estate, my suggestion is – find an agent that invests their time talking to consumers, not manufacturing questions for other real estate agents as a means of hoping to get your attention.

That’s right you heard it here first. Craigslist, Zillow, Trulia, PropSmart and the rest of them waste the buyer’s time. 

Even the buyer isn’t aware of this. The buyer is happy as a clam running from the latest mashup site to the next, spending hour after hour mesmerized by technology. It’s the same repetitive syndrome we see time and again through the evolution of the Internet, people get caught up with the fascination effect and lose sight of effectiveness and efficiency.

The entertainment factor neutralizes the cost in terms of time and ROI.

Here is a minor point: How many Realtors® or real estate agents do you know that remove their listings from these sites when the property sells or is withdrawn from the market? How many buyers are wasting their time looking at property that is no longer available for sale?

Here’s the biggie in my opinion: The technology has been in place for years now and used successfully that allows agents to input a buyers exact criteria into the system. The buyer then receives email alerts when new properties are entered into the MLS that match their criteria.

The buyer isn’t wasting time with viewing properties that don’t match their criteria and the email notifications work to the buyer’s advantage by often giving them a head start to be the first one in line with an offer.

The big hurdle with the buyer, besides the fascination and entertainment factors, is getting them to see that this is a real benefit we as agents are trying to provide to them and that we (at least the three of us on The Harper Team) are not trying to trap them into some inescapable premature contract. We offer a Cancellation Guarantee to all of our clients through the entire process.

I was reading through Wired and Red Herring today. There were articles in each on Yahoo!’s continued slide. Something in there got me to wondering – given that there are 4 million people with real estate licenses and that over 80% of people who search online eventually use a professional real estate agent to work through the transaction process – why isn’t someone really catering to the consumer’s need.

The battle cry is FREE the Consumer!, but the average consumer doesn’t want freedom from the agent. They prove that time and again when after wasting hours searching, they pick up the phone and call an agent.

This battle cry is a savvy piece of marketing. It reminds me of The Bubble is Bursting, The Bubble is Bursting.

Why doesn’t some savvy business person put a system together that supports the client / agent relationship. From what I see here in San Ramon, Dublin and Pleasanton, the local MLSes lag about two years behind the techno curve if not more. It will be 2008, I bet, before they have a really good Google mashup going. There are several million professionals that would love to see a product that helps them help their clients in a real way.