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Zillow to Acquire Trulia for $3.5B

dealbook.nytimes.com

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Re: Zillow to Acquire Trulia for $3.5B

#11

Post by chrisan »

stevekinney wrote: post #3
themartorana wrote: post #2

Does that leave any real competition in the space?

I guess there is still Realtor.com, but I'm not sure how popular the site is.

Having just gone through a move in the midwest, we used realtor.com as the primary search site. Too many times we found Zillow/Trulia information to be inaccurate, either missing listings or just wrong data for bedrooms/sqft.

Realtor.com was very kludgy but it was leaps better than the local MLS website even if well below the UX of Trulia/Zillow

Both the listing agent of my old home and my buying agent in the new state asked for Trulia reviews when the process was over

/1-random-data-point

Re: Zillow to Acquire Trulia for $3.5B

#12

Post by IgorPartola »

Having bought real estate, I can say that Zillow/Trulia are both a blessing and a curse. They are great in that you can see what's been listed for a while, scan a map, and generally put a pretty interface on house searches. This I imagine is their great advantage. I also found my mortgage company through Zillow's mortgage rate search.

Their big disadvantage is that their records are not updated as fast as the conventional MLS. The house I bought recently came on the market 7 days before I made an offer. It was not on Zillow even by the time we had the contract signed. The sellers, for whatever reason, put a very reasonable (possibly even low) price on the house, and I was at the end of the search, having seen enough locations in the area to know that this was a great value.

Another random personal experience: when I first saw Zillow I remember thinking "who needs real estate agents if you have all this?" Then I got an agent to buy my first house. All I have to say is "you do not know, what you do not know." While I do wish that agents simply took a set fee instead of it being a (very large) percentage of the purchase price, they provide a hugely invaluable service. I am not saying it's impossible to buy real estate if you don't have an agent; but if you can do it, you are probably a real estate agent.

Re: Zillow to Acquire Trulia for $3.5B

#13

Post by jscheel »

I listened to Sami Inkinen talk about how proud he was that Trulia was the underdog to Zillow several months ago. I assume that the acquisition talks had probably already started, even as he was talking about this. I'm not incensed at this, I just think we need to be honest with ourselves. When your competition wants to buy you, then you've probably done something very right. But everybody has a price and Zillow obviously found theirs! Congrats to them, they've done a lot for dragging the real estate market kicking and screaming into the future.

Re: Zillow to Acquire Trulia for $3.5B

#14

Post by themartorana »

rubyn00bie wrote: post #8
themartorana wrote: post #2

Does that leave any real competition in the space?

Yes there is, but it hasn't gotten any HN love... :( it's called Househappy.org. To really understand why it's different takes some knowledge of the industry. The biggest difference, the contact information on the listing is actually the broker who listed it! And it's free for anyone to post. Oh... And it's the easiest to use! At least I think so :-D Note: I work for Househappy

I would have guessed the "Note" part. Gonna check it out!

Re: Zillow to Acquire Trulia for $3.5B

#15

Post by jscheel »

NDizzle wrote: post #6
themartorana wrote: post #2

Does that leave any real competition in the space?

Redfin, but they don't do anything outside of the big cities. (Redfin doesn't service my area, for example - while I used Trulia to look at the school boundary markers and occasionally to look at houses.) Zillow's site is crap compared to Trulia. Hopefully they acknowledge that and bring Zillow's data onto Trulia's stack.

I've had trouble with Trulia's image serving for the past several months. It seems like their images just take forever to load, to the point that I switched back to Zillow.

Re: Zillow to Acquire Trulia for $3.5B

#16

Post by tptacek »

krschultz wrote: post #7
themartorana wrote: post #2

Does that leave any real competition in the space?

Real Estate agents. Craigslist to some extent. Generally speaking the biggest competitor to any innovate website is the status quo and apathy. Every startup I have ever been in had a harder fight against people that were reluctant to move to better technology than against our direct competitors.

Presumably, realtor MLS isn't so much as a "competitor" to Zill/ulia so much as the dominating incumbent.

88% --- eighty eight percent --- of home sales (presumably: owner-occupied single-family residence sales) were done using licensed real estate agents in 2013. A staggering amount of money is funneled through that profession, which as I understand it exercises guild-like control over the MLS databases.

Re: Zillow to Acquire Trulia for $3.5B

#19

Post by themartorana »

IgorPartola wrote: post #12

Having bought real estate, I can say that Zillow/Trulia are both a blessing and a curse. They are great in that you can see what's been listed for a while, scan a map, and generally put a pretty interface on house searches. This I imagine is their great advantage. I also found my mortgage company through Zillow's mortgage rate search. Their big disadvantage is that their records are not updated as fast as the convent…

The MLS walked garden is the problem it seems to me many are trying to solve. If I see value in an agent, I'll hire them no matter what - but even with my current place, my agent sent me MLS listings and I crawled through Trulia and the like, and emailed him what I was interested in seeing. The place I ended up in I saw on Craigslist. That didn't negate the need for an agent, but his access to the magical MLS that we normals aren't allowed to have access to was inconsequential, and keeping it secluded seems silly at this point.
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