Posted on November 6th, 2007 by Jonathan Dalton

Received an e-mail from Pete Flint, CEO and co-founder of Trulia, this morning highlighting the changes coming to Trulia Voices - an area where the general public can post their questions and receive questions from the pool of agents participating.

One of my biggest complaints about Trulia Voices is agents are ranked on the basis of how many answers they provide; this is like a magazine editor telling me they are going to pay me by the word. How much cash you have there, doctor? Same goes on Voices, where real estate agents across the country have felt the need to opine about the goings on in such well-known metropolises such as Casa Grande and Yuma.

Trulia’s now switching “Top Voices” to member search, where the top-rated members from a given region will be featured,

“factoring in multiple criteria including best answers, location, recent activity, thumbs up and thumbs down. “Member Search” will also help users easily find other members and highlight active and high-quality contributors.”

The only change I’m not much of a fan of is that the current approval “thumbs up/down” approval system is being revamped so that not all thumbs are created equal.

“Instead, we will take into consideration who is giving the thumbs up or thumbs down. For example, more weight will be given to a thumbs-up vote if it comes from a user who has a given lots of great answers.

“We will are also working to eliminate any attempts at gaming the system such as giving excessive thumbs up votes to friends’ posts, working in groups, creating new accounts and other tactics. Overall, this change will make the thumbs rating system a fairer evaluation of each contribution’s usefulness.”

How exactly does one determine what a “great answer” is? Voting’s not complusory, so it’s rather possible that quality answers simply may not receive a thumbs up or down from anyone. Also, if I give thumbs up to one agent’s answers because they’re consistently on the ball and thumbs down to another because they’re consistently clueless, am I going to be flagged for gaming the system?

All of that, though, is largely irrelevant to me at this stage because there’s a bigger issue surrounding Trulia Voices, and that is the people asking the questions generally are there because they want the expertise of a real estate agent and don’t want to pay for it in any way, shape or form. That can’t be corrected or adjusted through an algorithm change.

It’s an even more anonymous, hands-off approach than submitting a question through an “Ask the Agent” (or beagle) forum in that these folks don’t even want to be committed enough to submit a question to one agent through his or website.

For those who want to provide such free information on someone else’s platform, feel free to do so. For my own business, it makes far more sense to contain my expertise on my own blog on my own server. I’m not arguing against providing what truly is our product - our knowledge and expertise - unless someone writes the check. But I do think we are real estate professionals ought to think a little harder about how we distribute our product.

At this stage I guess you can say I’m not on a Trulia Voices picket line anymore. But I also can’t see where I’m going to contribute to the conversation over there all that much. It’s making less and less sense.

Short-sighted? Perhaps. But I don’t think so.

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Categories: General Real Estate, Marketing, Technology