Hot on the heels of Trulia’s announcement that Keller Williams’ listings will soon be added to Trulia’s database, now the company can proudly boast that another giant — Realogy — is on board. Included in Realogy’s portfolio are the giants Century 21, Coldwell Banker, and ERA.

Trulia has been slowly building its relationships with brokerages around the country to get their listings on board, and has won the trust of the industry — naturally wary of online predators who take the listings, snazz them up, and then sell them back as leads — by faithfully directing traffic back to the brokerage’s sites and staying true to its promise of making money only through advertising.

Don’t know how I missed this promo when it launched on Youtube late last year, but here’s some slick advertising for the company, featuring, amongst others, Alain Pinel’s CEO Larry Knapp.

This is where things start to get interesting. While Trulia’s search experience has always been at least on par with the best real estate search engines out there, its relative dearth of inventory — compared to broker-run and MLS-run sites — has been its Achilles heel. Sure, it’s always been fun and cool to search on their site, but in the early days when their site had only 20% of the listings in an area, many would have sacrificed Trulia’s coolness for the completeness of less cool sites.When Trulia got up to 50%, the same could perhaps be said. With Keller Williams and the Realogy giants now on board — as well as the large local players, like Intero and Alain Pinel Realtors here in the Bay Area — they could well soon reach the tipping point of, say, 80%, after which the remaining stragglers will have no choice but to go on board as Trulia becomes a more popular search destination.

It’s unlikely Trulia would ever have 100% of the listings in any given area because of the “long tail” nature of listings. In our MLS catchment area, for instance, there are currently 4110 active listings, of which fully 536 are from brokerages that currently have only 1 listing. There’s simply no way Trulia can knock on the doors of all these brokerages to get those stragglers, so the company will have to rely on the “me-too” syndrome for them to join.

Tags: Alain Pinel Realtors, Century 21, Coldwell Banker, ERA, Intero, Intero Real Estate, Larry-Knapp, Real estate, Realogy, Trulia

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David G. from Zillow — rumored to have implanted a chip in his brain that notifies him whenever a Technorati Zillow-tagged blog entry gets posted — noted in comments to my previous post that 86% of Zillow users own their own home, compared to the 69% nationwide average home ownership rate.

First, it makes good sense that the large majority of Zillow users are homeowners. I wouldn’t be surprised if the remaining 14% intend to become homeowners.
Secondly, since homeowners are on the whole more wealthy than renters, David G. points out that Zillow’s audience probably skews towards the higher end income bracket.

What does this mean for us real estate professionals? Quite simple: If Zillow is frequented by relatively wealth homeowners with a strong interest in real estate and by non-homeowners who for some reason also have a strong interest in real estate…then why the heck aren’t more of us advertising on there?

The usual real estate brokerage suspects are there — ZipRealty as well as everybody’s favorite punching bag Redfin, whose CEO Glenn Kelman was recently nominated by none other than Greg Swann as “the maverick of greatest contemporary influence on the real estate industry”.

Where are the others, the large, more traditional brokers? Where’s Coldwell Banker and its Cendant/Realogy Brethren Century 21, ERA, and Sotheby’s? What about Prudential and ReMax? What about my broker, Alain Pinel Realtors, a local powerhouse?

If your advertising dollars are worth spending on ads in print publications like Gentry and the Wall Street Journal, why not on Zillow?

Tags: Alain Pinel Realtors, Century 21, Coldwell Banker, ERA, Glenn Kelman, Online-real-estate-advertising, Real estate, Real-estate-advertising, Realogy, Redfin, ReMax, Sotheby's, Zillow, Zip Realty

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