Trulia Voices … Will the Public Jump in?
Posted on May 20th, 2007 by Jonathan Dalton
I added the Trulia Voices feed for questions about the Arizona Real Estate market to my Google RSS reader last week when the feature was introduced, primarily so I could jump in and answer questions as they were posted.
My thought, and presumably that of the folks at Trulia, is the Voices feature would serve as a sounding board for the buyers who visit Trulia and would like to learn more about a given area without having to contact an actual agent, losing anonymity and taking the risk of having to hear from this agent again in the future.
After a week, though, I’m still waiting to see whether the general public is going to jump in and start their own information gathering. Real estate agents have done so with gusto so far, which can be expected on any site where there’s a counter for how many questions a person asks or how many answers someone provides. (And the count for answers doesn’t stop with sheer volume - you also see how many times you provided the “best answer” in the estimation of the asker, how many times you provided the first answer and how many times you provided a useful answer.)
All we need to do now is award points with every answer, capping the total at 10 a day, and suddenly you’d have TruliActive Rain. But that’s another story for another day.
Trulia staff seeded the first few questions, nearly crossing multiple Fair Housing lines in the process. I viewed these as an online intelligence test to see who was dumb enough to answer and risk their license. Since then, however, questions have continued to come but most often from other agents. I’m fairly certain some of the agents doing the asking have no intentions to move to Phoenix, which leads me to believe they’re asking simply to raise the question count on their own profile.
Of course, doing so not only defeats the purpose but makes it rather difficult to find the questions coming from the general public. After all, if 19 out of every 20 questions were from someone simply seeding the queue for their own purpose, how long will you continue searching for the one answer from the public?
I’d like to think that the original purpose is to answer questions like the following which appeared today:
Is this a good time to buy in 85027?
The question’s a little too general to answer with any specificity, but if the buyer truly is interested in the area and is willing to provide a little more information, they’ll be well on their way to determining whether that’s the right area for them.
Assuming that no one jumps in from out of state, as some agents have, saying up front they know nothing about the area but will be happy to refer the buyer to someone (and collect a referral fee for no work in the process.)
As with any system, there are those who’ll use it properly and some whose sole interest is leveraging the system to their advantage with no regard for serving the greater good.
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It’s getting tough to play whack-a-mole with the questions on all these sites. Specially with “everyone” twitching to answer first and best like a duel at high noon.
By “everyone” I mean the rabid core of 50-100 of us in the RE.net. Same faces everywhere it seems.
If I didn’t have to actually sell homes once in a while, Athol, it would be sooooooo much easier!
Jonathan - you are right on our intention to provide consumers with a place to hear from the experts, and also right on the current mismatch between agents & consumers. Now that we’ve launched the product, we are doing more to drive consumers from listings to Trulia Voices. Thanks for being an early participant and for your patience!
Great post JD. The agents asking questions about areas that are thousands of miles from where they live strikes me as odd.
If you look closely, you’ll see a few that *appear* to be feeding other agents questions - and getting “reciprocal” questions back. I won’t name names, but it’s not all that hard to spot.
What’s the point? To get a bigger number in your profile? To make you appear to be an “expert”? I don’t get it. It would be like me lobbing softball questions about the west side of Phoenix, so you could smack them over the fence, and returning me the favor by tossing over questions for the east side… I hope it doesn’t de-evolve into that…..
I’m seeing the same thing Jay. When your asking questions about something six states away when you’re clearly a realtor… hmmm.
I’m seriously considering lampooning this and asking questions like;
“How do I parallel park in a station wagon in Phoenix?”
“My dog has been dragging it’s butt on the carpet on and off for a couple weeks now, is there anyone I can see in San Deigo?”
“I’ve just been mugged in New York. Whats the number for 911 here?”
“I’ve been a widow three times now. Are there many rich old guys in Tuscon?”
I’m holding off because it’s not exactly Trulia’s fault this question incest is taking place. Though if you give a scoreboard… hmmm.
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