Trulia Is In The House!

Pardon the pun, but has anyone noticed the Trulia search box on the right side of my blog?

They have a new program which allows you to put a search box on your website. When someone does a search using that box the results open up in a page branded to your company.

I thought that was pretty cool when I first read about it. I didn't completely understand how it might work, but it was interesting enough for me to submit my application to Trulia to see if they would accept my blog as a site for the search feature.

I didn't think I had a snowballs chance in you know what after I answered some of their questions, like how many visitors do I get a week?

After about a week I received an email saying I had been accepted and accompanying that email was a form I needed to fill out and send back to them. That was simple enough.

There was another form talking about web programming of headers and sizes of logos etc, which really sent me for a loop. I had no idea what this might cost me, because I certainly didn't have the expertise to figure this out.

WHAT TO DO?

What I did was just let the person know that I had no idea what he needed from me. His response almost floored me. He basically said well "Tell me a little about your website and what your purpose for having it is and let me see what I can do". So I did and within a couple of weeks of trial and error, my new friend at Trulia got me up and running.

I just wanted to relay that story. It just goes to show you; That if I can do it, anyone can!

Real Estate Networking, Online

Real Estate Agents and consumers have more and more options when it comes to connecting via the Internet. In the good old days agents would put their listings on their own websites or maybe their companies websites in hopes that consumers would look them up and make a connection with them. Then these listings began to find their way to sites like Realtor.com. Now the listings are being fed to local MLS sites like SBAOR.com and agents can now feed most if not all of the local Multiple listings to their own site through a system called IDX. What next? The last couple of years has seen a huge increase in online networking, Facebook and MySpace are probably a couple of familiar names. The real estate business is also facing the reality of consumers who want to get connected via a real estate networking site before they actually see homes or apply for loans. They have many questions and curiosities that cause them to seek answers. Some of the places consumers are getting answers are sites like Zillow, Trulia, Localism. 2008 will be interesting to see how Real Estate Agents market themselves on these sites as well as how the consumer use these avenues to get familiar with todays real estate market.

Why Does Zillow.com Get So Much Attention?

I have to admit when Zillow www.zillow.com first caught every one's attention I was one of those people. I immediately logged on and looked up my house and had Zillow tell me what it was worth. Zillow didn't do a very good job! It still showed my home being a 3 bed 2 bath home with 1316 square feet. We remodeled about 5 years ago and my home is closer to 2300 square feet now and it is a 4 bed 4 bath. Right off the bat this website struck me as something that needed a lot of work. I have been reading recently and Zillow keeps coming up along with another site name Trulia www.trulia.com. I have not spent any time on Trulia, so I'll do that later. So, I thought I would check back in with Zillow. It has probably been over a year and nothing on my house has changed and there are many sales in my area that aren't represented. I'm still not impressed. I did start poking around and saw that I could go in and change the information they had on my home. O.K. that's a start, but if other people don't do it then how is the pricing piece of the site going to be accurate? I then poked around a little further to see what homes are for sale and landed on a small Goleta Tract home priced at $799,000. The Zillow estimate of it's value was between $1,060,000 and $1,500,000. This amount of inaccuracy drives me nuts and I decided to say good bye again to Zillow, even though there seemed to be many other cool features to check out. I just can't see how a website that got all this attention for being a site where someone could determine the valuation of their home is still getting a bunch of attention. I guess I'll check back in again in another 6 months or so to see what is happening. In the mean time if you want to know the value of your home I would call a trusted real estate agent, of which there are many. See You In Escrow!