What's up with Realtor.com
At one time, Realtor.com was the place to be. I used to pay for enhanced listings and I could absolutely document closed sales as a result of real estate buyers searching on Realtor.com.
While their website was "clunky" and their technology seemed to be from the 90's, it still worked but I made the decision about a year ago not to renew and thankfully, my business hasn't missed a beat. Sure I likely would have recouped my investment but I just decided there were better places for me to invest my time and money on the Internet to advertise my listings.
There are a lot of real estate websites with a lot of buzz right now, Zillow, Trulia, Google base, MSN, Yahoo real estate and others. While Realtor.com still commands the most traffic, the technological solutions offered by the newcomers to the game are clearly superlative to what Realtor.com offers and you can only wonder how long Realtor.com will have the most traffic. My listings are syndicated to all of the above sites and are automatically placed on Realtor.com (they are just not enhanced listings any longer).
A couple of points: While the above mentioned hot sites who have great technology, they don't have all the listings because it's up to the individual real estate agent or broker to submit their listings. And while it makes sense to do that because your job when listing a home for sale is to give it the greatest possible exposure, many real estate agents are not that technologically savvy to do so. After all, some are still running ads in the newspaper.
The only place you are going to find the most listings is on a real estate agent's website who displays their local MLS listings through either an MLS gateway or an IDX feed. Click here to view all available properties for sale in the Charleston real estate market on the Charleston MLS.
And what about Realtor.com. Blanche Evans, the award winning Senior Editor of Realty Times doesn't think much about the new improvements. She says, "too little, too late". Click here for her opinion.