Winners, losers following Zillow’s $3.5B Trulia buy: OPINION

Now that Zillow officially came to an agreement to buy Trulia for $3.5 billion in stock, industry watchers are wondering what will become of the online listing giants’ remaining competition and how the partnership will affect brokers themselves.

Brokers likely stand to gain from the two online listings giants joining forces, as Zillow’s advertising dollars stands to translate into specialized leads and consumers drawn to agents who are experts and top-ranked brokers in specific geographic areas, Century21 broker Jim Klinge wrote in a column on the site BubbleInfo.com. But Realtor.com and local MLS companies will likely fall behind, despite the former’s recent effort to pump funds into an ad campaign aiming to promote its website, he opined.

Corporate real estate companies will likely partner up with the listings giant in the wake of Zillow’s big buy, a trend that has already begun to gather momentum. Local associations and MLS companies are expected to suffer from this collaboration, according to the site, because Zillow and Trulia will be driving most traffic to their site, which in turn will benefit the most successful real estate agents and pull away from purveyors of exclusively local listings. [Bubble Info] — Claire Moses