It has been speculated for some time that Google has been working on a way to sidestep the MLSes and post all real estate for sale online. Right now, it makes sense for most buyers and sellers to go to sites such as Realtor.com or Edina Realty to search for property.

However, Google, through it’s GoogleBase product, is now enticing MLSes throughout the country to consider uploading all of their data in to their database so that it is searchable. Check out Inman’s report on what Google’s up to. Google has created a slick 17 slide presentation for the MLSes. While they appear to be playing nice, only time will tell what Google’s intentions are. My bet is they plan to own the real estate search business and you will now longer go to sites such as Edina Realty.com or Realtor.com. This may still be several years away, but I suspect it’s coming sooner than the MLS boards or the brokers want to acknowledge.
It’s clear to me that the real estate profession is undergoing a rapid change that in part is being masked right now because people are feeling so much pain in the housing slowdown. But we are about to see hundreds of thousands of Realtors made obsolete in the not so distant future. Practioners not only will need to be professional and very knowledgeable about real property and the real estate transaction, but Realtors of the future will need to be tech savvy and become experts in internet marketing and search optimization. I’ll discuss this further in future posts.
So what does this shift toward online mean for the traditional way Realtors marketed property – i.e. the newspaper. My opinion is the newspaper is dead for marketing homes. Realtors, and the brokers they work for, detest spending millions of dollars each year in newspapers like the Star Tribune and the St. Paul Pioneer Press. In fact, Edina Realty has been in the process of weening the public off of seeing its advertisements in the paper and instead has once per month been running a front page ad in the Sunday home section directing people to Edinarealty.com for information on open houses and some 60,000+ listings. It’s rumored that by spring of ’07, Edina Realty will no longer sponsor the Star Tribune and St. Paul Pioneer Press weekend Home sections. The fact of the matter is, the world is going online. Newspaper ads don’t make the phone ring; they don’t generate showings, and they don’t sell houses. The only reason agents run advertising in newspapers is the sellers seem to expect it. But if we’re going to drive efficiency in this business we have to cut out the channels that don’t work. It’s time to cut the newspapers out of the marketing foodchain for real estate.
Now if we can get the car dealers to stop their advertising those papers will have great difficulty surviving.