Searching for the right home for you and your family can be one of the hardest and tedious tasks you will experience in your entire life. Finding time to look through the real estate listings and drive out to the locations can be a tiring process. Once you finally find your dream home, you still must go through the closing process and place your funds into escrow as the final sales transaction goes through before getting the keys.
The Internet has made things easier in finding the right homes with national real estate portals of Trulia, Realtor.com and Zillow. Unfortunately, potential homebuyers may not be seeing the full real estate picture. Large brokerages have begun to pull their listings from these national portals, claiming that the websites are detrimental to their businesses due to the way they advertise competitor and third-party ads next to their listings. This can potentially be sending clients away from these national brokerages as the buyers seek services from competing agencies. Other issues brought up was the accuracy of the data, citing outdated information is misleading to buyers.
Yet not all brokerages find these national portals bad for business. Smaller agencies and brokers just see it as a competitive climate as they are more than happy to place their listing on every platform available to reach buyers. With the larger brokerages pulling out, the small agencies could potentially gain more exposure through this Internet avenue.
On whichever side of the real estate line brokerages are placing themselves on, the true deciding factor will be the buyer looking for their ideal property. The buyers will always have the final say on where they will obtain their real estate information.
