With his courtly manners and Southern drawl, 22-year real estate veteran Jim Lee hardly seems the type to lead an uprising. In 1999, he was voted as the Knoxville Area Association of Realtors 1999 "Realtor of the Year," a popular and respected member of the old guard of the double-dip. But, like the Revolutionary War's Swamp Fox, Lee has a double life. He's also the unofficial leader and negotiator for a growing militia of real estate cyberguerrillas. Their self-appointed mission is to monitor Realtor.com and make sure that the NAR's partner does right by Realtors.

Why would Lee and others be concerned? Lead redirection. With over four out of ten homebuyers visiting the Internet to see listings, Realtors want to make sure they are the point of contact. Realtor.com charges agents to be featured on their own listings through "I-LEAD" Web pages which help steer the prospect back to the listing agent.

Realtor.com is a listing agent's dream come true. Unlike local classified ads, it advertises the listing free of charge, and enables it with virtual tours, school reports, mortgage calculators and other information consumers use. The purpose of these tools is two-fold: to provide captivating information for the consumer and to provide multiple ways to lead the consumer to revenue partners, including Realtors.

Over the last several years, Homestore.com, Realtor.com's parent company, has bought or initiated strategic relationships with several online lead generation companies including HomeFair, a relocation and moving site; IPIX, a virtual photography tour site; and Move.com, the official Web site of the Cendant brands, including Coldwell Banker, ERA, and Century21, among others. But these sites already had preexisting relationships and revenue streams revolving around Realtors, sometimes creating a conflict of interest for I-LEAD agents and their listings.

In its quest to keep its investors happy, Realtor.com offers numerous avenues to consumers to reach its revenue partners, but too often, the site either deliberately or inadvertently redirects leads away from Realtors, claims Lee. He says that the listing agents provide the listings, and if they are also purchasing Realtor.com I-LEAD pages, that Realtor.com should not be directing customers away from them.

"It doesn't matter whether it's an accident or on purpose," shrugs Lee, "you're just as hurt when you get run over."

Lee says he doesn't believe that Realtor.com means any harm to Realtors, but he does say that the company is run by "techno-geeks who don't seem to realize what effect some of the company's actions may have on Realtors."

"Realtor.com is supposed to be the official Web site of the National Association of Realtors," says Lee. "but they've lost their focus of who helps them out. They don't quite realize that we are the ones who put them there and keep them there."

Lee says his watch over Realtor.com started a couple of years ago when Homestore purchased HomeFair. "They had questionnaires on the bottom of the city report and school report (attached to each listing) which sent the customer back to HomeFair. If you filled them out, someone from HomeFair would call you. Those leads were coming from our listings."

The listing can't serve two masters, maintains Lee, who participated in a complain campaign to Realtor.com. Officials said they didn't realize that the leads were being directed away from I-LEAD Realtors, and a compromise solution was quickly worked out, capped by a personal call from the president of HomeFair.

"After we created enough uproar on the Internet, now if a customer fills out a form, the lead comes back to the listing agent, but only if they have an I-LEAD page," says Lee.

About a dozen Realtor cyberguerrillas and Lee communicate regularly, and sometimes others take the lead when they feel Realtor.com has transgressed. Tom Early, a buyer's broker and former president of The National Association of Exclusive Buyer's Agents has battled what he calls Realtor.com's favoritism toward listing agents. At his and others' insistence, Realtor.com now includes clearer direction to buyer's agents on the site's "Find a Realtor" directory.

Early has also been an outspoken opponent to the Move.com merger, claiming that Cendant's ownership stake in Homestore will influence the company too greatly toward what's good for Cendant franchises, including over 12,000 Coldwell Banker, Century 21 and ERA real estate offices.

Lee and his cohorts are also on top of the new partnership Homestore has just reached with Domania.com, a property reporting service. They found that on the HomeValue Check feature, consumers were only three clicks away from e-broker and competitor zipRealty, who had a preexisting advertising arrangement with Domania.com.

"If you click on HomeValue Check, you check the price history of your home and that takes the consumer to Domania.com and that is their partnership site with Homestore," explains Lee. "The logo is powered by Domania.com. The "Do your homework here" link used to be a hypertext link that took you to the domainia.com web site. What you found when you got there is when you clicked on "buy a home," you were taken straight to advertiser zipRealty where they offer to sell your house for 4.5 percent listing commissions, and cash back to buyers."

Other advertisers are a fact of life, on and off the Web. Just look at any newspaper, so what's the big deal?

"The point is they are getting there from my listing," clarifies Lee. "I am a paid subscriber to Realtor.com. I'm providing the listing but not to send leads to competitors. I am buying a lead generation package, not an ad. On Realtor.com, the lead generation package is in competition with their ad model."

"We are making Realtor.com more popular by letting them have 1.4 million listings. We aren't giving the newspaper a million listings, so there is a partnership there and they aren't quite holding up their part of the bargain," reasons Lee.

As recently as a month ago, Lee claims that he had to point out yet again another lead redirection problem to Realtor.com officials, where "Find a prescreened pro," led consumers straight to other Realtors from a drop-down menu. "From a Realtor's perspective, if they are looking at one of my listings, they've found a Realtor. There are 296 I-LEAD Realtors in this area. Why would they want to pick me when we all have the same I-Lead pages? I don't like those odds."

But that is a battle Lee may lose. Remember Early? How will all Realtors, including buyer's agents, have a shot at getting leads from Realtor.com if they don't use the listings as a launch? "Find a Realtor" is still on every listing, but it has been moved to the right hand menu. Still, Realtor.com is showing signs that is paying attention.

Realtor.com monitors a popular list-serv(tm) called Real Talk among other message boards, forums and chat rooms known to be frequented by Realtors and considers Lee to be a strong enough influence that when the company made a change to its site, Homestore product manager Donna Sechrist sent Lee a personal e-mail to help spread the word.

"I saw your post on RealTalk, and wanted to let you know that we recently made a change to the "Find a Professional" feature on REALTOR.com. The new version alphabetizes the professional categories, and when the feature is accessed from a REALTOR.com listing, the REALTOR selection is eliminated (as you correctly note, the consumer already knows from the listing what Realtor/Broker to contact," wrote Sechrist. "We appreciate the feedback that you and other REALTORs provide, and will continue to improve the site based upon those suggestions or requests."

Despite such olive branches extended, Lee feels he has to continue monitoring Realtor.com. Now the cyberguerrillas are engaged in a skirmish to force Realtor.com to enable other virtual tours besides its partner IPIX's. Again, says Lee, a relationship with a revenue partner is put before the greater good of Realtors. "There is only one official virtual tour, IPIX. You get four pictures for $99, but there are lots of other virtual tours for less money," complains Lee.

Lee says that a trainer for Realtor.com explained to him that you can put other virtual tours on listings by just dropping the hpyertext, but Lee says he has to supply the tours himself. "I believe it (the tour) is there in spite of them," says Lee. "There are 140,000 I-LEAD Realtors nationally, so those people can put tours on there listings, but if you don't have an I-LEAD page, that means that there are 600,000 Realtors who can't."

And that's why Lee, Early and others have taken it upon themselves to continue monitoring Realtor.com. What makes it worth it?

Lee says he believes in Realtor.com. "In fact, I just got a lead from them today," he says. He acknowledges that Realtor.com is always swift to reply and rectify the situation when something is brought to their attention.

"It's always, 'Whoops, we made a mistake,'" laments Lee. "But there needs to be somebody looking out for the interest of Realtors before they do something."

Published: January 9, 2001

Use of this article without permission is a violation of federal copyright laws.

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