Pete Flint is the man behind the spider, and that means he has to weave a sales pitch to lure brokerages to work with him.
Flint, the CEO of Trulia — a so-called spider, or software engine — that searches the Web sites of brokerages and collects information for a searchable database, communicates with industry insiders to figure out the best way to present results on his real estate search engine. He is contacted by real estate brokers daily in each of Trulia’s markets, including New York, and he says that his business relies on those relationships.
Trulia, with its Google Map mash-ups of different cities, market trends and sales prices, needs permission from brokerages to list their properties, and that means making nice.
Flint says that when Trulia entered the New York market, he met with brokers frequently “to really educate and explain where we see the future of the real estate search going.” That goal, a give and take of Web site content for online traffic, paused with one brokerage in May after almost four months of operation.
NRT Incorporated, the parent company of the Corcoran Group and the largest residential real estate brokerage in the United States, called Flint and told him that Corcoran would not be using Trulia’s services until further notice.
The Web site no longer displays any Corcoran listings. “We really built the service in conjunction with major brokers across the U.S.,” Flint says.
So why would NRT suddenly change their mind?
Both NRT and Corcoran declined to comment.
Flint says NRT is “reviewing their search engine strategy.” While they rethink their Web marketing approach, they don’t want spiders crawling their site.
Spiders are search engines that trove the nearly boundless reams of information on Web sites to bring home buyers the goods they are looking for, consolidating the findings on a single page.
However, of the real estate spiders that have multiplied in New York in the absence of a multiple-listing service, Trulia seems to be one of the few missing out on Corcoran content. Two popular ones, PropertyRover and Natefind, seem to have bypassed Trulia’s predicament.
They still list Corcoran properties.
“I have not been asked by Corcoran or any broker to have listings removed,” says Nate Friedman, owner of Natefind. “I have been very careful in all of the decisions we’ve made so far to not do anything that would upset them [brokerages].”
Natefind launched in February of 2005. “Trulia came out with a lot of press, and it makes someone wonder how they’re going to make money. I can see how that can be viewed as a threat,” Friedman says.
Laurence Ross, cofounder of PropertyRover, says he wasn’t contacted by Corcoran either. He also stressed the importance of the relationship real estate search engines develop with brokerages. In fact, Ross explains, PropertyRover worked exclusively with brokerages for years before offering its services to the public.
“The system we have right now evolved from our interaction with all the brokerage firms,” he says.
But if a company doesn’t want the traffic from Trulia, just like from Google of Yahoo, they can insert code to prevent the indexing of the Web site, Flint says.
“We’re disappointed not to have a respected broker like Corcoran up on the site,” he says. “Consumers are disappointed, and Corcoran brokers are disappointed not to get free traffic and marketing as well. At the end of the day, consumers are looking on the Web like never before for real estate. And if you’re not accessible through search engines, then you’re missing out on traffic. This is a way for brokers to tap into that traffic in a safe environment.”
Flint says he’s not worried about other brokers following suit.
Since the beginning of 2006, according to a spokesperson, traffic to Trulia’s top New York brokers has grown at an average monthly rate of 27.1 percent. And since Corcoran disappeared from the listings, other brokers have received 28 percent more traffic, the company says.