Real Estate Listings – Where and Why

Joel has a write-up on Edgeio and their acquisition of Adaptive Real Estate Services that puts them in a position to play ball with Realtor.com, Trulia and Propsmart. I’ve been a long-time fan of what Edgeio is doing in the classified marketplace, and think that their method of providing alternate ways for people to list items for sale via blog feeds is revolutionary.

Edgeio is a competitor to eBay. In their own words they aim, “to bring together, organize and distribute the world’s marketplaces.” Edgeio would like nothing better for you to think of searching for your next home, 1960’s vinyl record, or auto part on their site first instead of eBay. I think they’re moving in the right direction, and I hope they can start winning the mindshare of the general consumer.

When we talk about real estate listings though, we’re really talking about a real estate agent’s ability to market their listing and have it seen by as many people as possible. Just like in physical real estate, location is the most important component in having your property found through the web.

In today’s fast-moving web ecosystem, where should you list your property in order to get the most eyeballs? I would suggest the following list:

Craigslist – Gets a lot of traffic, and its regional focus makes it a very targeted way to reach potential buyers.
Realtor.com – The grandaddy of the listing services. Expensive, but gets a lot of eyeballs.
Edgeio – Now, since they are making a much stronger entrance into the market AND because they are an aggregator of listings from eBay and the blogosphere.
Google Base – This needs to be proved out a little better, but I would suspect that Google is well on their way to providing a real estate service integrated with maps and search.
eBay – Not a major player, because they’ve never been able to make real estate a big part of their engine, but worth listing on in specific circumstances.

Players who aren’t getting quite the same amount of coverage, but are still worth taking the time to get listed with are Trulia and Propsmart. These types of services, as well as services with very local niche markets like StreetEasy in New York, are going becoming very large aggregators of real estate listings nationwide.

As a fun little exercise, I compared Alexa site statistics between Realtor.com and four of the newer services (Trulia, Propsmart, Edgeio and Streeteasy) over a 6-month time frame and a 3-year time frame. See for yourself what digital changes are making to this landscape. Realtor.com is seeing a decline in eyeballs, and it would be safe to say that some of those are going to these other services.

Time will tell which of these sites will rise to the mass public consciousness level and be the “default” place to look first for real estate sales. Will there be a “Google” of real estate search, or will Google do that themselves?