“What is not new, alas, are the monopolies of morons imposed upon us by the National Association of Realtors and all of its many tentacular sub-cartels. Where everything in business is about to change radically — in response to the iPhone, to Web 3.0, to the unforeseeable efficiencies of the cloud — everything in our business will change at its usual glacial pace — driven not by the pursuit of profit, not by the thrill of innovation, not by the ever-more-vast oceans of information available to us — driven only by the need of the NAR and its cabal of sleazy vendors to hold Realtors hostage.” – Greg Swann, BloodHoundBlog

$15 million can go a long way to enable them to make this leap which seems to be the essence of those who are uneasy right now. I may be oblivious but I do not thing that top-down sites like this can ever accumulate the gritty, ground-level content about localities that real estate customers searh for. Trulia creates these “neighborhood” reports from an office in San Francisco or wherever about “Johnsonville, America” which is great but cannot be as timely and authentic as agent Smith’s daily blog posts based on his showings that day. I am not trying to talk down about a very successful company like Trulia, only trying to explain why I don’t think the sky is falling and about to land on the head or your neighborhood Realtor.

This brings me back full circle from my original comment. Some agents seem to understand that they can control their own future if they invest the time and efforts into building their own online presence and if that becomes a larger trend, then T may have a more difficult time in monetizing agents in the current local ad format.

Not saying that T is good or bad just pointing out items to gleam insight from great comments like yours as to what the future of RE will look like from an agents point of view. Personally, I think the T staff is very, very sharp and executes strategies very well.

What’s sad is the most RE brokerages are not learning from T and others and doing something similar for their own brands and for their agents, which is why LT / realestate.com are getting into the RE business as noted above.

Regarding this.. “why is it in the real estate industry do we always eat our own?”.

I think the answer is yes because of the RE business model in general. All agents even those in the same office are competing against each other. The RE community is basically comprised of 1 million or so capitalists… each trying to get their share.