That's a nice article Blanche but here are a few reasons why REALTORS feel the way they do about paying to advertise on a real estate site. The real estate sites themselves have made their FREE bed and now they're complaining about having to lie in it??? When RealSelect/HomeStore first went live with Realtor.com they sent representatives all over the country signing up REALTOR Boards and Asssociations to display their listings online with them free of charge. They even went so far as to say not only will WE PAY YOU to allow us to display your listings but we'll give you stock warrants if you will sign this nifty "Gold Alliance" agreement and make us the exclusive web site to display your homes for sale. I know HomeStore still pays my Association $1.00 per listing for the priviledge of displaying our listings on Realtor.com because it attracts more traffic to Realtor.com and they can charge their banner advertisers premium rates. So does Microsoft, so does HomeSeekers, and we don't pay anything to our local newspaper for displaying our lisitngs on their web site. They're all free because that's the way those web sites set up their business model and that's the way it was presented to REALTORS. Visual Tours recently did a deal with Yahoo to display their real esatate customers virtual tours there free of any additional charge and Yahoo not only seems to be happy with it they seem to be making money. BTW, my local print newspaper charges 50 cents per issue, how much did I pay you for this issue of Realty Times??? You say it's FREE; then how do you make money???

Back to Previous Post Printer Friendly Version | E-mail This Article to a Friend