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 unless otherwise noted.
Matt Stigliano, Realtor® Becker Properties | (210) 646-HOME | www.RErockstar.com
"Your all access pass to San Antonio real estate."
I like Trulia -- as a listing tool but I feel that Active Rain offer a better tool for information research
Hi Matt, I have never used Trulia so I will check back and see what others have to say!
There are many innaccuracies on trulia. It's nice that you help out.
Trulia and Zillow are good places for people who are just thinking about buying a home to start. But once they have a little information, they need to connect with a realtor who will give them the solid data and professional advice they need to make wise decisions.
I mostly use Trulia to answer customer's questions. I have heard from several of my clients that they are using Trulia and Zillow for property evaluation, and of course I do offer them a custom MLS search and prepare CMAs as needed!
Eric - I use it for listings and answer questions on Trulia Voices, but I wonder what how you see it from the consumer's point of view - is it useful? If you're using it as a listing tool you must find some value there, correct? Do you see it as value for the consumer or value for you and your listing?
Shirley - Do you send your listings there through something like Postlets?
Maria - Those innaccuracies are what worry me. How many does it take before the consumer distrusts the site or send that blame back to agents. I agree with you on their use - a general fact finding search before getting "serious."
Susanne - If they're using sites like this for property evaluation and are getting inaccurate information, do you find that it makes your job harder when trying to explain the fair market value of their home?
Matt - funny you should mention it... I wrote about it a couple of weeks ago as I have seen increasing number of incorrect information both on our listings and people asking in the Trulia Voices questions such as ' why does it say this house has 4 bed, 3 baths? It's not rigth I live in it!" or something like that.... since then I have manually started inputting (yes what a pain) the listings in Trulia. ~Rita
Rita - Please throw a link up here so others can see what you had to say (I searched through a few pages, but it's late and I couldn't find it). The Trulia Voices questions you mention are a big part of what I find myself answering on a constant basis. It's frustrating to watch everyone get bad info and I can't help but try and help. It's a shame, because for some people, it's all they know or they avoid agent sites because they fear the "hard sell."
Trulia and Zillow have their pros and cons - - I like both of them. However, many times they provide much more information for the public than our IDX solutions have the ability to do, not to mention - - speaking of mistakes in the information - - what's correct about restating DOM on the MLS to hide how long a listing has actually been on the market?
Susie - We use two figures for DOM. One is DOM which is just for that particular agent/broker. CDOM is cumulative and adds up all the days regardless of switching agents or anything. I like the one stop shop feel of the big sites and I can see why consumers would be attracted to that, but if the data is flawed I wonder how long before consumers turn away from these sites.
There is inaccurate information in the MLS too. It's just part of having human beings involved in the process.
Hi Matt!
Thanks for being a Trulia fan and for proactively helping us flag various content on Trulia. We appreciate it when professionals like you step up to the plate and lead by example. Our community is better because of members like yourself.
My comment Via you "Good or Bad" Post"
"Many of our sites listings come from our partners via a feed. Sometimes there are data errors upon initial agent/broker input, sometimes there’s a technical glitch. People and technology are not perfect - so it’s understandable when errors occur with images, price or descriptions. They key is to diagnose & remedy them expeditiously.
BTW - We temporarily removed both listings in question as we work on diagnosing and correcting the errors. Thanks so much for flagging the properties.
Data is updated daily and is presented based on the info we receive. So when a price change or property description is changed or property is sold on the agent/brokers site, it will be updated on Trulia as well. Manually entered listings if not updated frequently will be removed after 30 days."
More and more consumers are coming to Trulia looking for listings, help, information and more. Consumers are pretty savvy and can/have managed to avoid bad avice or the hard sell which some still continue to do.
We are always looking to improve the quality of the data we present and want to let everyone know that it is something we work on daily. Together with the help of our partners and community we can continue to help make Trulia a place where agents and consumers can efficiently connect with each other and find quality information.
If anyone has any particular feedback, you can always email me at rudy at trulia.com
Thanks again Matt for a good conversation.
Best,
Rudy
Social Media Guru at Trulia
Rudy - As always, thanks for stopping by. You and I have chatted before about the effects of erroneous data and the good news is, we agree on its effect on the consumer. I think that's what worries me the most. I know you as a company don't want a ton of junk data on your site, because we all know that can lead to your downfall. Mistrust by the consumer will never help a website.
It frustrates me to no end that some of the bad data is provided by agents, for me this is inexcusable. I know we all make mistakes, but we need to pay more attention to the details. Myself included. One of my recent flags over there was for a listing for $11,900 that was incorrect. Unfortunately, the data came from postlets, meaning some agent or assistant input the information wrong (I've seen that sort of stuff on the MLS from time to time, but as I pointed out earlier - we face penalties when we make mistakes like that in our MLS, with Trulia there is no penalty for being sloppy). The solution as found by Trulia was that since the data was coming from postlets, it was the agent's fault and needed to be dealt with on their level and it was suggested I call them. Unfortunately, I don't think that should be Trulia's response. My opinion would be that Trulia would want to investigate it themselves and not ask an agent who reported it to contact an agent that made the mistake.
All the other flags I've put in have been dealt with quickly and usually with a few words from the support staff (there's a few I've continued conversations with after the ticket was closed). I think the customer support team is excellent in this regard.
The recent photo thing seems a bit odd and I'm wondering if it's not some really strange data issue...computer hiccups if you will. Either that or there are a lot of agents out there with the same sneaky idea (to swap photos for fabulous homes). There will always be data issues no matter how hard Trulia works because of the nature of how you're getting and providing data. I know that. I just have to wonder how much a consumer will take before they feel Trulia's usefulness has been diminished. If you all stopped working on fixing things like this, I would bet you'd be a sunken ship in weeks. Good news is, you are very pro-active and I hope the consumer sees that as much as I have in speaking with you and support staff.
Thanks again for stopping in Rudy.
Matt- Great post with super discussion. Nice to see Rudy pop in for his direct insight. Stephanie and I love Trulia - we subscribed to Trulia Pro (we were suppose to get a t-shirt but never received it... but that is another story, Rudy are you reading ?) and love it. Our data shows that many consumers are reaching out to us through Trulia as we are an active participant on Trulia voices as well in addition to many people getting to our website from our listings on Trulia as well. Our decision to enhance our listings there was based on the fact that we benefit from leads but more so because of the increase traffic that Trulia is getting.
We have found that there are errors on all the main sites... Realtor.com, Zillow and Trulia. Hopefully things will improve over time with input errors and Trulia acting quickly to the flagged listings. Obviously, the more inaccurate info, the more that consumers might just stay away all-together. However, with us, I have not had any issues with Trulia or have not seen that to a great extent (obviously all of our listings MUST be correct... LOL, maybe not as we make input errors too). Great discussion !
Chris - Make sure Rudy gets you your t-shirt! I haven't used Trulia Pro as of yet, but the normal free service can be quite useful. I just got an accepted contract receipted today - and it was someone I picked up through using Trulia Voices (and being helpful - it actually relates to the photo/descriptions not matching that been helping to spot and get corrected lately). My frustrations with Trulia tie into the inaccurate data and although there are errors on many sites, the errors lately have been many. I just hate to see consumers confused or misled (even if not on purpose) by bad data. I would rather be answering questions on Trulia that are about real estate issues instead of answering questions about why this particular home for less than $140K shows photos of a house that is obviously closer to the million dollar range (and yes, the photo/description mix ups were that bad recently). I do agree that Trulia brings with it great opportunity for consumers to learn more and for agents to help educate them, but I fear that if too much information is seen as faulty, it could cause them great trouble down the road.