We have been betrayed by NAR, but is that really a surprise. How does NAR survive – like the UAW – the more members the better. So, by creating some half-baked website that can be used as a revenue source the revenues increase and control is taken out of the hands of agents.

I think I see Big Brother!

I also have a problem with being coerced into spending more money to get an enhanced listing, with more photo’s and a link… it smacks of blackmail. Then again Realtor.com has to make money to stay in business, anyone can understand that. I just think NAR set the whole thing up wrong.

Having said that – I’ve never had a problem uploading photo’s, I have made money from enhanced listings and featured agent programs, I just resent having to spend extra money to do this. I think it should come as part of our NAR dues (even if they have to raise them a tad for all).

There are many ways this could have been done better, and many ways it could be fixed, but nobody at NAR seems to care.

Some of the fault also lies with Realtor.com. I have actually spent HOURS trying to get someone on the phone or by email to inquire about purchasing enhanced products. No phone call, no email – perhaps they should check into a chat with a live person program?

And you wonder why agents hate Realtor.com? lol, I say we should all deluge NAR with our complaints, after all, NAR is the one who set up this wonderful business arrangement and NAR is the one who can change it.

To be totally fair, I’m willing to bet there are a variety of factors which may or may not have led to leads from your listings on REALTOR.COM. Some of which may have been out of your control – such as an abundance of similarly or lower priced listings in the same market place competing for the buyers’ attention, or possibly other market conditions that no amount of internet showcasing could overcome. I’m sure there are many stories of upgraded showcase listings on REALTOR.COM that didn’t generate leads; and certainly as many that did. That’s just life. Purchasing a showcase on any site isn’t a guarantee that the buyers will either a) find or b) like your listing enough to inquire on it.

On the other hand, I’m sure you agree with me that REALTOR.COM still faces the overall challenge that even with agents like yourself, who are willing to at least try to upgrade their listings on their site, if the rest of the “common” inventory looks really dreadful, it’s going to scare away traffic for everyone. Yourself included.

I hope you are achieving better success with your online marketing efforts elsewhere. Thanks for stopping by and reading the blog.

- Matthew

I was not impressed. I’ve never had a problem uploading pictures to any other web site,, only the “Showcase” program on Realtor.com.
As a side note, after my dismal experience with Realtor.com I decided to call as many other “showcase” subscribers as I could find to enquire about the number of leads Realtor.com generated for them. I e-mailed 45 Realtors and approximately half replied. The response was unanimous. I did not hear one success story. None of the Realtors who replied had received one single call or e-mail from visitors to the site.

Anyway, I’ll not be flushing my money into Realtor.com anytime soon.

How did NAR ever sell this:

“OK, members, here’s how this is going to work: Your MLS is going to give this private, third-party vendors of ours your listings for free. They get an exclusive forever, and then they are going to turn around and extort money out of you if you want any chance that people will actually see your listings. Then, they are going to dork up the whole presentation with a lot of advertising that no one would see unless you were providing them with free listings to pull in traffic. No, you don’t get a dime of that revenue.”

And you wonder why Realtors hate Realtor.com?

Then, lets consider the “Google factor”. Google showed people that search should be simple, and we know that most moves are local. Therefore, lots of people use listing addresses as keyword searches.

Go to the “new and improved” Realtor.com Beta, and, where it looks like keywords should go, type “105 Third St Newport RI”…and you get 45 listings, ONE of which is the one you want (and there is no indication of which one that is).

Now, lets try that same search on Google and the #1 link takes you to the property detail page on the broker’s site (Full Disclosure: My company supplies the site that has the #1 link, as well as 6 of the other links on that page for that listing, and Realtor.com is nowhere to be found).

You can also get a pretty good idea of what you want to know just by reading the info we put in the page address that Google displays: We tell you the asking price, the property type and the MLS# among other things, right there on the Google Search Result Page (SRP).

Now why would Realtor.com trade accuracy to show you 44 listings you don’t want? Could it be that, the more accurate their results, the fewer ad impressions they deliver? How could they extort money from agents and brokers for visibility if they had an accurate search engine that subverted their ponzi scheme of “featured listings”?

The signs of decay you note are just the beginning. The short history of the Web has plenty of examples of companies that held a dominant market position fumbling it to new competitiors: WebCrawler, AltaVista, and of course the biggest choke of them all, Yahoo, to name a few.

Realtor.com is no different, they just got a reprieve all those years that the market was hot.

On the other hand, Realtor.com’s foggy future is about more than poor quality of photos and data. It’s also about a business model which is adversarial to members/contributors, and a bad start-up philosophy for the business: “Our contributors are also our customers, and they will be accepting of our incompetence because they are loyal Realtors.

I don’t know how you remove the bad tastes of early mistakes and poor technology. Maybe you don’t. And maybe the evolution of the online real estate world leaving ten-year-old ideas behind. Whatever it is, I think it’s greater than the fact that our members have trouble with presentation skills.