photo courtesy of swanksalot
I have said it before and I'll say it again.
I'm an overall fan of Trulia and the service they provide. I think they have a better product than most of the national real estate search sites and are extremely user and agent friendly. But, that doesn't mean I love everything they do. As an active participant in Trulia Voices, I enjoy the thought that the consumer can ask questions and get answers from real estate professionals, but of course, there are some problems with that thought (those are another story altogether, so we'll leave it at that).
Recently, however, I've seen too many inaccurate listings and questionable practices. With that in mind, I decided to go to the blogs and see what conversation I could drum up. I wrote "Trulia Real Estate Search - Good Or Bad?" over at RErockstar.com after being frustrated this past week with feeling like I was responsible for keeping Trulia's data accurate by flagging inaccurate listings. While I appreciate the fact that Trulia is very responsive to flagged listings, I feel it shouldn't be my duty to clean up after others.
So why do it, you may ask? Because I am here to help the buyers and sellers of San Antonio. If I leave bad data floating about in communities that I participate in, then I am no better than the people providing the false info. While I will never be able to clean up every piece of data in cyberspace, if I ignore the bits I'm aware of, I feel that I'm just feeding into the concept that we as agents don't care about the consumer and their overall real estate experience on the internet.
I'm curious to hear from the agent community too.
So what do you think? Although many have strong opinions on the value of sites like Trulia and the on-going conversation about whether they help or hurt us as agents, I'm more interested in how you view them from a consumer's point of view. Would you use them? Have you used them? What do you do when you see inaccurate data or even worse, pure violations of the various laws and ethics that we subscribe to?
All content ©2008-2010 by Matt Stigliano, Realtor® unless otherwise noted.
Matt Stigliano, Realtor® | RE/MAX Access | (210) 646-HOME | www.RErockstar.com
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