David Barr's Sarasota and Venice Real Estate Blog

Follow up to my blog post and Tweets about Corbett highlighting homes not for sale on Fox and Friends: I got a call from a Trulia representative around 7am PST.  I guess I hit a nerve. I stand by my assertions. The three homes he highlighted are not for sale on Realtor.com  He provides no MLS numbers and he provides no listing Realtor information. Trulia offered to send me and email with the MLS numbers.  I challenged them to rebut me on Twitter. Crickets.  I'm sure Trulia is now in the process of restricting my access to their website as Zillow has.  The Ministry of Real Estate Propaganda marches on. Stay tuned.  I'm sure Fox News doesn't want real estate misinformation on their air.

This morning I was subjected to the idiotic choreographed grinning of Trulia's "real estate expert", former soap opera star Michael Corbett. There's no doubt Trulia and it's competitor Zillow are expert at marketing themselves as the go-to source for real estate information.  But nothing is further from the truth. Take today's example of Corbett's segment on Fox and Friends.  He picked three examples of some "great real estate deals" in different parts of the country, ostensibly from Trulia's suspect list of homes for sale. Two of the three homes he showcased were not for sale on Trulia's website. Read how Trulia, and to a greater extent, it's competitor Zillow, does business and why:   www.davidbarrhomes.com/debunking_zillow

Woo hoo! I got an email today from Trulia to let me know my profile on their site ranks in the top 1% of agents nationwide, for views by real estate consumers. I'm not a big fan of Trulia and it's major competitor, Zillow.  In fact, I think these two sites do more to damage the real estate business than anything Congress or a bad economy have done.  Why?   Read more here. However, these two sites do receive a lot of traffic, and offer free exposure for me to promote my brand and my online presence, including my website and this blog.  I consider it one of my missions as a Realtor to help consumers who post questions on Trulia's forum, understand why so many of their "listings" are not available for sale, and why so many of their property value estimates are flat out wrong.

Today I read a short post on another brokerage in Austin, TX who is pulling their real estate listings off of Trulia's website.   You can read the short article here:  http://bit.ly/JmUw8A Congratulations to Good Life Realty in Austin!  It seems we share the belief that misleading customers is not a good business model. In the past few days I have canceled my Trulia Pro membership, but I can still answer questions from confused consumers who are getting misinformation on their site, just as I do with Zillow. As you can tell from previous blog posts, I am not a fan of Zillow and am rapidly becoming outspoken against Trulia as well.  Like Good Life Realty, I choose not to tarnish my reputation by associating my name with misleading data on websites more interested in selling advertising.

I've made it a personal mission to put out the word about Zillow's misleading "Zestimates" and how they do a disservice to the buying public.  After all, is it just a coincidence that Zillow came into prominence in 2006, at the same time the real estate bubble began to burst?  Anyway, I digress. Now another confused potential Sarasota area home buyer has apparently registered on Trulia for a user account, and gets updates on "new listings" from Trulia and their syndication partners like RealtyTrac.  View this buyer's confused plea for help on Trulia here:  http://bit.ly/JYxxT8 No wonder the public is confused. Does anyone think it's a good business practice to entice mass numbers of prospective buyers and sellers with misleading "listings" that aren't actually available?  Is it good business practice to then sell those so-called "hot leads"to local Realtors, whose job it will be to explain how Trulia and Zillow don'...