Surely Ye Jest: the upside down world of listing aggregators

http://activerain.com/blogsview/512312/Violation-Of-Fiduciary-Responsibil

This is not aimed at any person or company -- it's aimed at wrong-thinking. Listing sites get listings from real estate agents and real estate companies. There are a bunch of sites that advertise listings, including all the agent websites that have IDX. No one listing site is critical to an agent's marketing plan, at least not yet -- if a site came along that proved so wildly successful at marketing homes that agents found them indispensable, well, then that's a different story.

There is no evidence so far that any one site is wildly successful at marketing listings which cause transactions -- I have seen anectdotal evidence but as we know that is flimsy evidence. I am sure if homes were being sold through a particular site that the site would be marketing the statistics.

We're not even sure that the traffic going to these sites are mostly viable buyers or look-loos or agents looking at their listings or people playing with map functions and games or people in forums discussing real estate in general or what.

A direct marketing effect would be buyer referrals from the site who contact agents and buy the home they saw on the site. I don't see any numbers realted to direct transactions -- I only see traffic numbers. 

In the article above it's suggested that you may be doing your seller a disservice by not advertising listings on Zillow -- mainly because it's free and there is lots of traffic. I want to know about results. I'm not impressed by free -- "price in the absence of value is meaningless". I forget who said that, but it's true.

The better way to think of it is in terms of marketing results. The site that produces the best results (transactions) is the site that should be used the most. I'm not sure a site can produce results on a free model -- It seems to me a site would have to provide a service that is valuable and agent-focused and could be charged for so that agents have better exposure -- the emphasis on FREE is misleading. Don't get wrong, if a site can come up with transaction results for agents and give it away, then that would be nifty. As Jeff brown says -- results, results, results.