Sell-by-owner listings on the NAEA website? Not in our lifetime.
Written by Mike Carter on November 17, 2008
In the US, one of the biggest property portals, Realtor.com, has just announced that it will allow sell-by-owner listings to appear within it’s website. Realtor.com is the national agent website for the US market and you could say is the equivalent version of the NAEA here in the UK.
Is this a natural result of the judgment made by the Department of Justice against Realtor.com? Or is it another way in which to drive more revenue from the 5 million people who visit Realtor.com month? Probably both, but it doesn’t matter how the PR machine spins it.
The point is that the US government got involved in allowing access to an 800-pound gorilla in the property space so that FSBO (for sale by owner) could be listed next to agent listings.
Will this happen in the UK? Remember what happened last year when Tesco tried the same thing with Rightmove.
Lots of subscription model portals would be lynched by the estate agents who are paying to list if SBO appeared in the same results as theirs.
But what happens when property search engines start to include every listing regardless of source? A search engine is meant to include all related content, so if you use that definition, why would SBO listings be un-included. Aren’t we as a search engine meant to include everyone who wants to list?
And what about the fact the SBO is such a small part of the market in the UK and most agents are not really threatened by SBO. (that is what a lot of our closest agents tell us)
Would like to hear your voices on this topic 
November 18th, 2008 at 4:08 pm
I think sale by owner listings on traditional portals is a time bomb waiting to happen. All the portals would love to be able to charge owners significantly more per listing than they are able to charge agents. However, you are right, agents will be up in arms about this. Some portals are already trying to muddy the waters between agent listings and sale by owner listings. Upad for example have taken a feed of agent listings from Zoomf, claimed they have the largest number of listings of any portal and then tried to sell sale by owner listings directly to owners. my view is that it doesn’t really help to sell properties having numerous different portals showing the same properties. Each portal needs to have something unique about it to make it worth advertising on. Rightmove are still by far the most succesful agent in traffic terms, probably due to their advertising spend.
November 18th, 2008 at 4:14 pm
Agree completely.
Two things need to happen with portals, engines and the agents.
1. The syndication partners need to be clear. If portals and engines distribute listings to other websites (a good thing for everyone as long as clicks come back to source) then that needs to be stated.
2. Conversion tracking needs to be enabled. Currently the majority of agents only understand volume of traffic. There is not a lot of talk about conversions which is the measurement of ‘quality’ of traffic. So 1,000 clicks from portal X should have a metric that says 70 converted (for example). Those ‘conversions’ would be emails submitted as a result of the click to your website.
Regarding claims of ‘largest listing’ … I’m not touching that snake-pit.