Actually ActiveRain & Trulia both REALLY suck…
ActiveRain and Trulia suck Realtor’s time, energy and resources, real estate agents also have a tendency to lurk on:
Zillow advice, Realtor.com Blogs, Homegain Blogs and Yahoo Answers hoping to get lucky and trip over a lead.
Most of these companies have raised a great deal of money to make their sites appealing to both consumers and you the real estate professional. They all appear on the surface to offer a quick fix to an agent’s online presence – their line is: “It’s so easy, no hastle, blah, blah, blah ….”
So let me ask you a question: If you knew the whole story and if you knew how easy it was to set up your own online presence would you actually pay them to contribute your time and market expertise?
There is a pattern with all of these sites – their common master plan if you will.
Realtor.com started the whole thing off by paying MLS’s for listing data back in the mid 1990′s. According to them, when the economics made less sense (actually, when they were powerful enough to get away with it) they turned round and wanted the data for free. What they said to the MLS’s was “Give us the data or we will get it direct from the Broker’s anyway”, charming!
They were the only game in town for a while so they also thought it was a good idea to start charging Realtors for enhanced listings and other marketing “enhancements”. I have always had a problem with this money making practice, they insisted on taking our listings for free and now charge us to receive the leads back!
Realtor.com almost went bust a while ago when accounting irregularities came to light leading to jail time for several execs.
Now lets take a closer look at Activerain and Trulia ..
Trulia – Let’s not forget that this upstart started off as a scraper, sending out software robots to scrape any unprotected sites for listings to display on their site and gain some early traction. Let’s also not forget the quite recent “nofollow” controversy where Trulia deliberately disallows Google and others from following the listing links from their site to yours.
Backed by high-profile venture firms Sequoia Capital and Accel Partners, Trulia has recently raised $15 million in additional funding, bringing its total financing to $33 million. These funds will be used for further development of recent feature roll outs, and the introduction of even more new products for users. 
This includes the expansion of the Trulia Advertising Network. So whose wallet is going to be used to pay off the debt?
Yours of course!
Do you think these guys have your interests at heart when they invite you to participate in their Trulia Voices platform?
And guess what, just like Realtor.com everything was free until they thought they were strong enough to start reaching into your pockets …
ActiveRain – In January 2009 ActiveRain announced it has received $2.75 million in funding from fellow Seattle venture and lead generator HouseValues.com in exchange for a minority stake in the company.
The owners of ActiveRain had previously tried to sell their platform but in fact this plan was foiled as Move.com (the operators of Realtor.com) backed out of the deal at the last minute. After the deal went sour and within weeks their free offering suddenly wasn’t free anymore (for new users).
ActiveRain is by far the single largest Realtor driven social networking site. ActiveRain offers some cool resources including a free blog for each member. Members are incentivized to blog frequently and to post comments on other users blogs by receiving points for each activity. Now I ask you, why would any intelligent agent fall for Activerain’s points system? Unfortunately I know many who did and many who still do 
The problem is that ActiveRain seems to be built for the primary purpose of Realtors to communicate with one another (and they make it look so easy – but hello, this is not the reason to be online). Or just maybe their primary plan was to build a huge membership and then sell for tens of millions of dollars?
The others suck too – lets not forget Zillow which is a heavily-financed venture with a total of $87 million raised so far. How on earth do they expect to recoup that sort of money without coming after you, the Realtor or mortgage broker, lender etc. But we will leave that analysis for another day.
It amazes me that Realtors voluntarily give so much valuable time and information to private companies for free (or worse pay them) all the while adding value and allowing these guys to build empires worth tens of millions of dollars and asking for nothing in return.
It’s really not that difficult to start your own blog, (that’s what this site is about) to start your own reputation online and probably a lot cheaper in the long run than these guys who will raise prices whenever they feel bold enough.
Conclusion. Real estate agents why are you buying into this? Are you nuts? Have you no pride? I’m not alone in this thinking see what these guys have to say:Realestatewebtrainer, Greg at Bloodhound and Realestateindustrywatch. Marc at 1000Watt has a slightly different view.
So why are so many agents sucked into this vortex? Think I’m being alarmist, or just controversial? What do you think fellow Realtors? Leave a comment and let us know.
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Well I can’t agree with most of what you’ve said. Yes we can start our own site & blog if we choose to do so. Others CHOOSE not to or use a platform provided for FREE. Is yours free? Didn’t see that mentioned in your obvious commercial for your own product. Back to the products – AR is great stuff with alot of technical sharing done between the agents. When it is no longer advantageous to me I will remove my content from the site & go elsewhere. In fact, many top bloggers are doing just that now. We can see the train coming down the tracks even if you don’t think we have the mental capacity. Trulia sucks as you say & is still just a scraper site. Very time consuming site that most are just playing with for free right now. Realtor.com is a joke charging their own members $19.95 to post a virtual tour. Highway robbery! Zillow still considers itself a contender inspite of all the inaccurate and outdated closing informaton on the site. Nothing can be as up-to-date as the MLS and Mr. John Q Public just doesn’t know that yet. They want those instant answers with ‘inaccurate results’. Zillow’s marketing is still fooling the public.
Looks like we started something here, or perhaps we just hit a nerve or two?
Lyn seems to agree that contributing to some of the data aggregators content and using the “free” or not blogging tools offered by ActiveRain and others may not be in her best interests long term. We completely agree, which is why we wrote this post in the first place.
I love generalizations…. Way to go, WREM! I bet that, instead of using any of the platforms you’ve listed, you have JUST the right answer for the people reading this blog, right? Only YOU can get them to be a 7-figure agent in only THREE MONTHS! GASP.
Please. It’s dinosaurs like you who don’t seem to notice that social networking is the next evolution of marketing on the web. Get with the program.
Janice, you won’t find any outrageous income claims here, Drew and I are active Realtor’s who walk the talk.
Many Realtors are intimidated by social media and don’t know where to start and let’s not forget that with the current state of the market many have more time than money.
So please, use the free resources we have created here – start your own Wordpress blog, create an online presence that is yours and yours alone, rather than help line these guys pockets.
The only “product” you will find here is a subscription to the membership portion of the site to make it even easier to implement WordPress and social media and if you still would rather not do the setup, we can do it for you.
There is an important bonus – if you do it right and sometime in the future you want to or need to retire, you will have a site that you built and own – one that will have value that you can sell to another agent.
Lyn said, “When it is no longer advantageous to me I will remove my content from the site & go elsewhere.”
I don’t get it. Sure, you can remove your content, but then, what was the point in writing it in the first place?
I don’t ever have to worry about my blog no longer being advantageous, or needing to move my content. It’s mine and always will be.
I think that’s the point. It’s not a matter of cost. Wordpress is Open Source (Free). Hosting is cheap. I think there is a very valid point in building YOUR brand on YOUR domain with YOUR content. Not spending inordinate amounts of time collecting worthless points and building a website for some other company.
Yes, there is great networking on AR, and you can learn a lot there. There is also a ton of crap and misinformation there too (as there is on any large site).
But what’s going to happen to all those who are there, and only there, when they wake up one morning and find the rules have changed?
I never have to worry about that on my blog. I make the rules.
Jay, thanks for contributing! Actually I think both these posters got mad at me for suggesting they were probably “nuts”, perhaps they skipped over this part near the start of the article:
So let me ask you a question: If you knew the whole story and if you knew how easy it was to set up your own online presence would you actually pay them to contribute your time and market expertise?
Link to relevant article: http://webrealestatetools.com/blogging-for-real-estate
Wow @Jay – you actually did it! Totally agree with you too ….
http://www.phoenixrealestateguy.com/why-i-deleted-my-activerain-blog-posts/
I think the primary reason why many still post to places like Active Rain is Google juice. I have my own blog and am slowly building it up – but I still repost to Active Rain. I wati a couple of days and make sure that the original content is attributed to my own blog. I also change some of the content. As my blog starts to take off – which it will (but that takes TIME) I will probably pull my content from AR. In the meanwhile it has been a source of clients in a very, very DEAD market in my area.
For those who smugly say that they had significant local traffic pretty quickly, I have to add that it is different now. The web is getting exponentially more crowded and competition for placement on Google or even getting noticed at all on sites like facebook and twitter is fierce.
Do I realize what these sites are up to? YOU BET. But I am USING THEM to generate traffic to my own site and to pull people into Listing Book and IDX. When I am able to, I will pull the plug. Meanwhile – most of what I do on AR and other sites is free – and since I’ve created the bulk of the content on my primary site, it is not that time-consuming.
Great article!! It should stimulate some interesting debate.
The aforementioned sites should never be a brand. First off anyplace where one can post for free is a risk. Twitter. Personally right now I cannot add friends or change my password or background art. Do they care? Why should they? They are not making any money. Facebook is a hackers dream with daily phish scams. Come to think about it Twitter suffers the same. These places are not a “isnt the net cool everything is free and you get rich”.
Its a parasitic spot. Collect a herd and send them to your home base. Their is always a trade off in free. They get content and you get x. It could be webspace, ads (like on Trulia). Minimally the giver is getting content from us. But in cases like Trulia and Zillow like widgets perhaps you might unknowingly give up link juice. In Googles case you give up datamining. In my circle of friends many call their tools spyware. I guess it depends on how one defines what is spyware. They are paying the webmaster with nice analytics or whatever. Either way the public and Realty community are giving away tons of personal information and value for trade without really thinking about the cost.
And often it is to save a few bucks.
Tim, thank you for adding to the conversation! I think your comment about those darned widgets that are prolificating because they are free and cool is a very valuable point that should be explored in more detail …
… I think I feel another blog post coming on!
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There are some really great comments here. I agree with everyone but Lyn and Janice. Just a note here for Ruthmarie, I have done the same type of reposting you talk about on AR and as a REtomato graduate it’s something I was taught to do. Just a warning though… I had to start waiting over 3 weeks to repost because google was grabbing the AR content as the original, even with a prominent link back to my site. I don’t know how they pulled that trick but it ticked me off enough to only repost once in a blue moon.
We should get a grassroots movement started and withhold all of our content and listings from these sites. We’ll see how they fair then… plus we’d all be better off. Great post.
I have noticed this too Ben. I’m WAITING longer to post to AR. I was waiting a couple of days – two weeks seems long to me.
This is good information, but I am wondering if you have found any sites that are worth using? What is your critique of Homes.com. It's a portal that is designed for the consumer, but at the same time offers Realtors the opportunity to brand themselves, promote thier listings and even create traffic to the Realtors' site. It appears to be a service which is upfront with the Realtors and has a month to month contract. Some Realtors just don't have the time or knowledge to promote their own sites. Many Realtors even go as far to use their own names as their domain name. Not much help to the search engines. Advertising is important and print ads that just don't have the kick of years gone by. What portals do you feel offer value?
This is good information, but I am wondering if you have found any sites that are worth using? What is your critique of Homes.com. It's a portal that is designed for the consumer, but at the same time offers Realtors the opportunity to brand themselves, promote thier listings and even create traffic to the Realtors' site. It appears to be a service which is upfront with the Realtors and has a month to month contract. Some Realtors just don't have the time or knowledge to promote their own sites. Many Realtors even go as far to use their own names as their domain name. Not much help to the search engines. Advertising is important and print ads that just don't have the kick of years gone by. What portals do you feel offer value?
Other than doing your own website, what's the choice?
This is good information, but I am wondering if you have found any sites that are worth using? What is your critique of Homes.com. It's a portal that is designed for the consumer, but at the same time offers Realtors the opportunity to brand themselves, promote thier listings and even create traffic to the Realtors' site. It appears to be a service which is upfront with the Realtors and has a month to month contract. Some Realtors just don't have the time or knowledge to promote their own sites. Many Realtors even go as far to use their own names as their domain name. Not much help to the search engines. Advertising is important and print ads that just don't have the kick of years gone by. What portals do you feel offer value?
No Time or Knowledge to Create Your Owne Website, The Next Best Thing is?
This is good information, but I am wondering if you have found any sites that are worth using? What is your critique of Homes.com. It's a portal that is designed for the consumer, but at the same time offers Realtors the opportunity to brand themselves, promote thier listings and even create traffic to the Realtors' site. It appears to be a service which is upfront with the Realtors and has a month to month contract. Some Realtors just don't have the time or knowledge to promote their own sites. Many Realtors even go as far to use their own names as their domain name. Not much help to the search engines. Advertising is important and print ads that just don't have the kick of years gone by. What portals do you feel offer value?
I agree that you should have your own content on your own blog, but…
I see you have a blogpress blog. Is this in your own domain? Even if it is, what happens if blogpress changes the rules? Isn't your blog published with blogpress programming and subject to blogpress continuing to service the blog?
I'm asking because I don't know and I want to make my short sale blog MINE… not ActiveRain's, not Realtor.com's, not Blogpress'.
Sorry… I didn't mean blogpress… I meant Wordpress Blog.
All I can say is THANK YOU! Just the snipit about Trulia disallowing google to follow links back to my website is enough for me to stop spending time on Trulia. I'm all about research, but somehow just bought into all this without even questioning Trulia's viability. I'm web savvy and just saw it as an SEO shortcut. It's not, by any means.
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