Zillow and Trulia feeds both NOT syndicating on my IDX Broker
Trulia and Zillow are NOT receiving my leads. We were relying on
ListHUB. I have is selected as ‘y’ in IDXBroker, but they are not
syndicating.
This is a recurring theme in emails and phone calls this week. What can be done?
First – What’s the issue with Zillow and Trulia and ListHub?
Zillow and Trulia have recently joined forces as Zillow purchased Trulia. In the meanwhile the Rupert family and their company have purchased Move and control Realtor.com. So now all of this data is being held by a few big companies.
Now there is some issue with the feed from ListHub going to Zillow.com
Zillow/Trulia buy these listings from your MLS or from an aggregator like Listhub. They could also get them from you using your IDX Broker syndication feed.
The Truth about Syndication
The truth about real estate syndication is that the big companies don’t want to have to get feeds from thousands of realtors across the United States. There are too many “break points” and too many sources and the data can have all kinds of problems.
They like to get them from the MLS or in a better case (for them) from an aggregator like ListHub.
Even in the “good old days” Zillow typically wasn’t getting the feed from your website or your IDX feed. You were sharing it with them, but they don’t have to load that data. You are just sending it to them and it sits in their virtual “inbox”.
What can we do to fix this?
That is the $50,000 question. The way the system is setup now, we all have to wait for Zillow to get onboard with our MLS and figure out what they want to do.
The long term solution, in my opinion, is for the MLS to NOT sell those listings to Zillow, Trulia, or even Realtor.com. These sites served a purpose long ago, but they are not necessary today.
I believe that if each MLS held these listings instead of selling them for $1 each to ZTR, then each brokerage and each agent or broker would make a lot more money.
Think about it. When you buy a car, do you search for car lots all over the United States at Cars.com for your car, or do you look at localcars.com or myhometowndealer.com to see what is available? A car is much easier to transport than a piece of real estate.
If I want to buy a new home in Vail Colorado, I don’t need to go to Zillow. I can just Google “condos in Vail” and then I could get a bunch of results with companies in Vail who sell condos. That is every real estate company in town!
Then each company enters a lottery with each other for who gets the client. They don’t have to buy me as a lead from realtor.com or Zillow or Trulia or Redfin. That 25% of each transaction or monthly fee, could be paid by the agents and brokers to the MLS to NOT sell listings to the big-boys.
Until then, we have to all just hold our shorts and wait for Zillow to decide to put our listings on their site.