That’s because today we announced a strategic marketing agreement with Realogy Corporation, the largest real estate franchisor and owner and operator of residential real estate brokers in the U.S, to put more than 500,000 of their affiliate real estate listings on Trulia.com.
Source: Truli-a Real Estate Milestone

That same day, Realogy announce that they putting listing on Google base, and Trulia 

Parsippany, N.J.-based Realogy has added about half a million listings from the three brokerages to Google Base and to Trulia.com, a real estate search engine started in 2005 that makes money through advertising.
Source: Businessweek.com

So who wins the battle of the listings? We all do!

This is a major breakthrough for all real estate tech developers, access to 500,000 listings using google base API's.

Is this bad news for Trulia? of course not…they are way ahead of the curve and one of the top real estate search websites. If the not the best. so the rest of the developers will have to catch up. The questions is will they?

One downside is there are going to be a lot of junk sites using homes to generate traffic for their adsense revenue. We have no problem with sites spidering our listings, but the links better all go to us. If I search for one of our listings and I find it on a scraper site, with I link going to some other brokerage, I get spun up. 

Is there a way to stop scraping? I don't know

Can agents get more control over their listings and stop it? I think so, but maybe not?

This was in the Sacramento CL real estate section. Nothing more, no phone number, no contact no price. It is obviously spam, because there was a malformed link pointing to ustravelagencies.com.

This apartment has just been renovated, and has brand new stainless steel appliances; hardwood floors, and is sunny until the sunset. The lay is very simple! Once you enter the apartment the door to you left is where your bedroom room of 11×9 is located with one closet.

Maybe this post is just ahead of its time. With home search technology advancing everyday, maybe we will be able to do home searches for 11×9 bedrooms, with one closet as you enter the apartment door?

We can only hope

I have been writing some code for clients of mine and I thought I would post a simple way to add your IDX framed solution to your blog as a page. Since, I love wordpress, and recommend it to everyone else, I made it a plugin you simply upload to your plugin directory.

Download plugin: Realivent home search plugin v1.0
Instructions:

1. Download plugin, then unzip into your plugin directory.
2. Activate it. Once activated it will be in under your admin options section.
3. add your IDX framed solution link, set width (in %, normally 100% is best), set height (in pixels, normally around 1500), set border (either yes or no), set scrolling (yes, no, auto). Then click update and your settings will be saved in your blog options.
4. write a page. Make sure you click on the html tab so that you are writing your page in html, not design mode. Design mode will strip the tags. So, while you are in html mode write this: “<!–Home Search–>” without the quotes and publish the page.

Example website using wolfnet: http://smartlegacy.com/search-for-homes/

I have only used it with wolfnet and SFAR public search, so if you want to use it and have a different idx solution, please try it and let me know if it works for you. If you need help, just send me an email and I’ll get your home search working in your blog.

More features will be developed soon.