Dramatic events - the week of December 4, 2006

Following is a short entry in the Inman news on events of last week. Anouncements by Zillow and Homegain. Not long ago MLS was the only place listing could we placed or found.

Thursday was a big day for online listings
As the market slows, numerous Web sites are offering Realtors new places to market their listings to prospective buyers. But Zillow isn't the only one who stepped up with an offering of this kind this week. HomeGain, which operates an online service to match consumers with real estate agents, on Thursday announced it would allow agents to post listings at its Web site, which gets millions of visitors each month. And HouseValues, an online lead generation source for real estate agents, also on Thursday announced it would enable its agent clients to push their listings out to the Google and Oodle search engines.

Not long ago, these offerings were unheard of -- a lot of time and energy went toward keeping listings info in the hands of industry professionals only. There was Realtor.com and IDX for broker Web sites, and not much else.

But times are changing, along with broker attitudes toward marketing listings to the world. The slow market could be the best thing that ever happened to consumer access to for-sale data. 2007 will be the year that listings make primetime: Google Base, Zillow, Oodle, Trulia, HomeGain, edgeio … lots of free marketing avenues for agents to woo in buyer clients.
--Jessica Swesey, Inman News