Contact Me

  • Tony Arko - Realtor®/Broker-Owner - Complete Home - Loudoun County, Virginia
    [email protected] 571.238.6882

    View Anthony Arko's profile on LinkedIn

Google Analytics-LF

Visitors

  • Visitors

« Power Outage! | Main | Washington Mutual, National City and Now IndyMac »

August 02, 2007

Comments

Developersagent.com

You make a great argument for the success of the newest wave of online brokerages. One you may have forgotten is Redfin which recently released its brokerage on the East Coast and I foresee being very successful. The problem with Realtor.com is the lack of incentive they have to keep up with the changing industry and the lack of feedback available to help them remain up-to-date with everyone else. Unfortunately, until the day comes when the profit driven sites outrank Realtor.com, nothing will be done to improve the site.

Read more at http://developersagent.com/

DavidG

4.3 million unique visitors visited Zillow in July yet the 6M figure above seems to agree with R.com's reporting - don't draw too many conclusions based on Compete data. What would you like to see Zillow do differently?

Tony Arko

Hey David. The graphs were used as a way of illustrating how poorly the website that is endorsed by NAR is doing compared to the ones with no built in audience or guaranteed listings. I commend you on getting and keeping eyeballs on your site. The problem is that I, as a real estate agent, don't sell more homes because I put my listings on your website. It doesn't help me sell the ones I have listed and I don't get very many leads even though I have sold more homes and have more listings than any agent in my area. I did get one purchaser call me in January and mention zillow as the place where they saw my name and he did in fact purchase a home with me. But I haven't received another since then and I have between 20 and 40 active listings on your site any given month. To answer your question, I am not sure what I would do differently but as of now, I don't feel you help me do my job better. And in some regards, you make my job more difficult when your "zestimates" are extremely inaccurate.

Louisville Real Estate

I'm suprised to see that zillow hasn't made more of an improvement in this area.

Ernie Tabel

Good points about Realtor.com's user experience. There're actually various efforts at Move to improve this situation, but internal political conflicts are making progress slow.

"I also have found out that prospective buyers who reply online through realtor.com to a listing, get redirected to someone other than the listing agent."

Where'd you find this out? Generally, when a consumer submits a lead for a property listing on Realtor.com, an email is automatically sent to whatever email address Realtor.com has on file for that listing's agent. They don't redirect the information anywhere.

You might want to check with your Realtor.com account, and make sure they didn't mess up your email info...

Pete Flint from Trulia.com

You said:
"And the reason realtor.com and zillow.com aren't doing so well? Because when I put on my buyers hat and think about what website helps me best find a home and information about that home, trulia is the obvious choice"

While, I don't watch all the traffic stats of other companies in the category, with this comment you just made my day! Thank you!

I'm happy you like the product, we do believe we are just at the beginning of where we want to be, so I hope that you'll be pleased with all the new things that we're planning to add in.

Pete

Tony Arko

Ernie, I have checked with realtor.com about my email address and they have the correct one. Since January I have received 7 emails from realtor.com regarding buyers interested in my listings. I get 60 to 100 per month from number1expert.com sources. The traffic at all the number1expert.com sites combined barely equals the traffic at realtor.com. So either they send the inquiries somewhere other than to the listing agent or they have no idea how to capture a lead. My guess is both.

Pete, I'm just telling it like it is and your welcome. Keep innovating. But could you make the pushpins a little smaller?

Louis Cammarosano

Homegain beats Zillow hands down on compete

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/homegain.com+zillow.com?metric=uv

AND homegain was the first to have a web based homevaluation and you can try it at Http://www.homegain.com
Zillow is just a copier six years after the fact.

Danilo Bogdanovic

Louis - Thank you for pointing that out in the pursuit of shameless self promotion. Perhaps you and David G should chat some time :)

Susan Penn

I happen to like Realtor.com. It is very user friendly. The front page lets you see similar housing and you can locate land, housing, rentals.

Louis Cammarosano is a shameless self-promoter

Why is Louis Cammarosano so hell bent on attacking Zillow every chance he gets? He is always disparaging the Zillow tool yet he trumpets his own tool on HomeGain which is even more inaccurate than Zillow's. I think it is just a bad case of envy because of the attention Zillow is garnering. BTW anyone who thinks a computer generated program can substitute the services of an appraisser or real estate agent deserves the ill-effects of their lack of common sense.

Tommy Martin

Zillow is a great company i'm sure they will pull through.

The comments to this entry are closed.