Now it’s real estate’s turn.

Or at least that seems to be the case in what could be a developing feud between real estate agents and online listing services such as Zillow, Trulia and Realtor.com.

As these sites have risen in prominence, real estate agents are starting to push back, especially as they find it difficult to live without them.

In protest, a small number of agents have started to pull their listings from the sites. (In one case, an agent rambled on about the issue in a seven-and-a-half minute video on YouTube.)

A new white paper issued this week suggests that the topic is gaining momentum.

The report, written by VHT, which sells photography and video services to agents, concluded that agents are no longer competing against each other. The competition, rather, is “the fast-growing, third-party ecosystem of listing aggregators, online publishers, virtual tour providers, advertising networks and media companies that are dominating search engine results in order to capture online leads.”

It goes on to suggest that the remedy is for real estate agents to become savvy online marketers, and to drive sales leads through their own Web sites, rather than advertising on Zillow or Trulia.

A Zillow spokeswoman says only one brokerage so far has pulled its listings — the same one that produced the YouTube video — and a Trulia spokesman said they’ve “only seen a couple” of agents remove listings.

Seattle-based Zillow went public in July, raising $70 million; San Francisco-based Trulia is expected to seek an IPO sometime this year. Realtor.com which is operated by the National Association of Realtors, is owned by Move, Inc., a publicly traded company.

“We are not their competition,” said Trulia’s spokesman Ken Shuman. “We are a marketing outlet with 20 million unique people coming ever month who are looking to buy or to rent a home.”

So, while the practice does not seem to be widespread, agents are increasingly vocal about the shift in power that has occurred over the past decade from real estate agents to online Internet providers.

Indeed, Zillow, Trulia and Realtor.com do get the majority of online traffic.

In January, Zillow controlled 37 percent of online visits; Trulia controlled 27 percent; and Realtor.com controlled 25 percent, according to the report. The remaining 11 percent was split among dozens of brokerage firms, such as Century 21, Coldwell Banker, Keller Williams, Prudential and many others combined.

“As an industry, brokerages have done a poor job of making themselves and their Web content visible to search engines,” wrote VHT’s CEO Alex Zoghlin, who authored the report.

But to understand what’s going on, it requires some basic knowledge of how the industry works, so let’s step back for a moment for a brief overview.

The Multiple Listing Service (MLS) is a list of most homes for sale in the U.S.

Real estate brokers receive the list and can post it on their Web sites. But other sites, like Zillow and Trulia, are not brokers and therefore don’t have access (unless they strike agreements with the different MLS divisions across the country).

Up until now, Zillow and Trulia have used a mix of sources, including agents, who volunteer to post their listings on their Web site for free.

Zillow and Trulia then make money, in part, by selling advertising to agents, who want leads for home buyers and sellers.

But it’s not exactly clear what has some agents so upset, and more importantly, it’s difficult to separate fact from fiction.

ARG Abbott Realty Group broker and president Jim Abbott, who recorded that YouTube video, lists a number of reasons for pulling his listings from the sites. He says the information is often display incorrectly, or is out-of-date; other claims he makes include theft of intellectual property and poor customer service.

What Abbott didn’t come right out and say is that he is not happy with the shift in power, or that the sites are profiting off the information that agents give them.

But late last year, Edina Realty of Edina, Minn., was willing to say it: The company said it pulled its listings because it was unfair that the agents are giving up their listings for free to the sites, which were then profiting off those same agents.

But according to Zillow’s spokeswoman Cynthia Nowak, that is not entirely true.

“What many agents don’t understand is that it is completely free to receive prominent placement on their listings,” Nowak said. “All they have to do is sign up for a free Zillow profile and verify their contact information, and their name, picture, contact info, etc. appears at the top of their listings.”

Still, to pull a listing off Zillow or Trulia at this point is somewhat anti-homeowner. The home’s seller is usually looking to reach the largest possible audience in order to sell their home — and is not interested in the politics of placing listings online.

An agent in Phoenix Jay Thompson, who goes by the handle “The Phoenix Real Estate Guy,” sided with Zillow. In a long blog post, Thompson broke down each one of Abbott’s points and explained why he disagreed.

On one point, Abbott said that syndication sites use peer pressure to sell advertising to agents.

Thompson’s response: “If you don’t like the fact that syndication sites sell advertising, that’s fine. Don’t buy it. Peer pressure? Put on your big girl panties and stand up to the peer pressure and do what YOU think is right.”

But who knows if his statements were entirely unbiased? Two months later, Zillow hired The Phoenix Real Estate Guy as its director of industry outreach and social media.

But at least one part of his blog post is true, no matter where he works.

He asked, “Is there an ‘anti-syndication movement’ afoot in the real estate vertical? Maybe. Maybe not. Only time will tell where this is headed.”

Indeed, it is not clear. After all, this might be another example of an industry playing catch-up with the Internet.

The Seattle-based company, which aggregates real estate listings online, has priced its IPO between $12 and $14 a share. Once the sale is complete, it will have 27,058,139 outstanding shares. At $14 a share, the company will be worth $378.8 million.

The company plans to raise up to $55.7 million, not including over allotments, if any. In conjunction with the offering, it expects to secure an additional $5.5 million from Technology Crossover Ventures, which will buy shares at the same price as the IPO.

Zillow expects to trade on the Nasdaq under the symbol “Z.”

Its two closest competitors are privately held Trulia and Move, Inc., which has a public market capitalization of $355.5 million.

But San Francisco-based Greystripe, a mobile ad network, says there’s a bigger opportunity in selling brand advertising when you take a slightly larger view.

“When we looked at the market for local and hyper-local, there’s no brand play there. We asked ourselves, how do you get rich media into a hyper-local experience? It’s not obvious, but the big place for the brands to place ads is at the regional local level,” said Greystripe’s CEO Michael Chang.

To that end, Greystripe is announcing a strategic partnership with Media Networks, Inc., a Time Inc. company, which goes by MNI for short.

Greystripe will leverage MNI’s 80-person sales team, which was focused exclusively on local buys online to sell mobile ads, while MNI will rely on Greystripe’s expertise in mobile and inventory of mobile applications and Web sites. It’s the first time MNI has moved into mobile, and for Greystripe, it will represent a significant expansion beyond its 12-person sales team.

Chang said even though you see local plays, like Groupon and LivingSocial raising billions of dollars, the regional play is not to be forgotten. The hyper-local guys, he says, are often going after the same dollars allocated to the Yellow Pages, whereas there’s a separate bucket for big brands wanting to advertise locally.

Examples include a car dealership that covers a whole region, a hospital that treats patients in an entire county or a McDonald’s franchise that owns multiple locations.

“It’s not so fine grain,” he said.

That funding comes just a day after news that competitor Playfish Inc. has agreed to be acquired by Electronic Arts Inc. (ERTS) for $300 million plus $100 million in potential earn-outs. A third company, Zynga Inc., which also makes games played on social networking sites, has raised nearly $40 million from venture investors and is currently locked in litigation with Playdom over theft of trade secrets.

We caught up with Tim Chang, principal at Norwest, to talk about Playdom’s latest funding. Here’s an edited excerpt of our interview:

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The San Diego-based company late Tuesday announced that a subsidiary will begin offering what it calls FLO TV Personal Television. Qualcomm said U.S. retailers are expected to offer the device over this holiday season at a suggested price of $249.99.

FLO TV is a wholly owned Qualcomm unit that operates a special network that broadcasts TV signals, rather than having users call up video programming using conventional cellular networks. So far, the service has been available on specially equipped cellphones.

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The social-media service–where users send short “tweets” to followers who have signed up to receive the messages–came in handy for Innovative Beverage Group Holdings Inc., whose drankbeverage.com site crashed last month after a surge in traffic following a segment on Fox News for the company’s so-called relaxation beverage, which contains “calming” ingredients like valerian root and melatonin. News Corp. (NWS) owns Fox News as well as The Wall Street Journal.

Innovative Beverage notified consumers on its Twitter feed that it was working to resolve the problem. The company also did a search on Twitter for mentions of the site crash, so it could respond with tweets describing its repair efforts.

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As many already know, John Malone has been a cable legend since he first ran Tele-Communications Inc. back in the early 1970s.

Besides being there at the founding of many channels, the Liberty Media (LCAPA) chairman’s influence put most of them on the map and his forceful business skills willed cable into becoming a key consumer medium for entertainment and news.

Malone talked about that experience onstage at the seventh D: All Thing Digital conference and how it mirrors what is going on now as more content is being distributed on the Internet. And, more importantly, he discussed how it might or might not be paid for.

You should listen, because Malone is a genuine media pioneer who could teach Web players a thing or two.

Here’s the full D7 video of the session:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090618/liberty-media-chairman-john-malone-the-full-d7-session/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090420/apple-apps-ahead/ http://allthingsd.com/20090420/apple-apps-ahead/#comments Mon, 20 Apr 2009 10:01:56 +0000 Yukari Iwatani Kane http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=10907 Apple (AAPL) is about to remove the shackles from developers of applications for the iPhone.

While iPhone users have mostly praised the steady stream of games, guides and other programs released thus far, many developers have been frustrated by their inability to do more, such as allow users to purchase digital content within an application. Until recently, Apple Inc. has been slow to give them the tools or a blueprint with which to make that possible.

Now the company says it is on the verge of launching a new iPhone operating system — and a toolkit to help developers of new applications for the handsets. Apple says the new operating system itself will add more than 100 features, including the ability to cut and paste text, and a virtual keyboard for use when the phone is turned sideways, making it easier to type emails. The toolkit is expected to add about 1,000 functions to help developers come up with new applications.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090420/apple-apps-ahead/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20080812/where-your-old-gadgets-find-a-second-life/ http://allthingsd.com/20080812/where-your-old-gadgets-find-a-second-life/#comments Tue, 12 Aug 2008 21:32:45 +0000 Katherine Boehret http://solution.allthingsd.com/20080812/where-your-old-gadgets-find-a-second-life/ It’s a fact of life and one of the reasons I have a job: digital electronics will eventually break or get replaced. But it’s hard to know just what to do with the gadgets that get left behind. Some people stuff them in junk drawers. Others want to donate or recycle their old electronics, but worry about compromising private data. And plenty of people want some monetary compensation.

This week I took a look at some options for people who want to get rid of old electronics, one way or another. The good news is that there are a handful of Web sites that make it easy to do this — and some of them may even pay you for your old products. The bad news is that you’ll likely receive only a fraction of what you originally paid, especially if you waited a while to get rid of it.

Some sites, like Gazelle.com and VenJuvo.com, offer cash for your items and/or will recycle products. Another site, TechForward.com, lets people pay a fee to “lock in” a value for how much the site promises to pay for the product in the future. MyBoneYard.com accepts only laptops, desktop PCs, cellphones and flat-panel monitors, and gives Visa (V) gift cards rather than cash.

I was surprised to receive significantly different value offers from Gazelle and VenJuvo when trying to sell the exact same products on each site. In one instance, VenJuvo offered me $30 more than Gazelle for a digital camera; another time, I got $15 more from Gazelle for an old Apple (AAPL) iPod. It’s worth the extra step to shop around at more than one of these sites before getting rid of something.

Both ask a few questions about the item, including its condition and whether or not it still has the accessories that originally came with it. Gazelle determines a product’s value using retail — think Amazon (AMZN) and eBay (EBAY) — and wholesale channels; VenJuvo uses similar criteria and also looks at competitors’ prices.

If you worry about someone stealing your digital data, you’ll likely not feel comfortable dropping something in the mail that’s chock full of personal information, especially if it no longer powers on to allow the owner to wipe this information.

Both Gazelle and VenJuvo accept at least some types of digital cameras, laptops, MP3 players, GPS devices, camcorders and gaming consoles. Gazelle also accepts cellphones. But they don’t take everything. Gazelle doesn’t take LCD TVs and VenJuvo doesn’t accept satellite radios and portable hard drives or any smartphones or cellphones other than the iPhone; neither accepts desktop PCs.

I took the closest look at newly released Gazelle, owned by Second Rotation Inc., and walked through the simple start-to-finish process of selling a gadget and receiving money from the site. After pulling up the site, people can find their product and its value by choosing from a list of nine categories or by typing some part of the product’s name into a search box.

I sold Gazelle a first-generation iPod Mini with four gigabytes of memory for which my boss paid $249 in 2004. I answered a few questions about the product: Yes, it still powered on; no, I didn’t have the original AC adapter, manuals or software installation CD, and it was in “excellent” condition, according to my assessment. Gazelle placed its value at $25.

At this step, I opted to add the iPod to my box and check out, but users can also add other items to a box, including electronics for recycling. Gazelle’s policy is that it pays 100% of shipping costs for any box shipped to the company, so long as there’s at least one item in the box worth $1. Eighty percent of transactions qualify for a free box; the rest can be sent with printed-out prepaid shipping labels, but you must find packaging.

Gazelle lets users receive payments via a mailed, paper check or using PayPal; money is received either way within five business days. People can also donate their money to one of 23 causes, including the American Red Cross and World Vision. I opted for PayPal, and the $25 amount was deposited shortly after Gazelle received the iPod.

I sent the old iPod to Gazelle in a brightly colored, empty box that arrives at a customer’s door a few days after he or she sells the device to Gazelle. I secured the old iPod in the box using balled up paper, and sealed it with packing tape. A prepaid shipping label was already stuck to it, and I needed only drop it off at UPS.

If Gazelle receives a product and decides that it isn’t worth what you said it was — either more or less — and you’d rather not sell, the company will ship the product back, free of charge. But while Gazelle’s site guarantees users that they’ll receive their money, and that personal data are safe with the company, no money-back guarantee is offered.

Gazelle hopes to calm nerves by posting detailed instructions on the site about how to wipe a device of all private information. But the company hasn’t yet done this, and numerous users will remain skeptical even with such instructions.

I also poked around on VenJuvo Inc.’s Web site of the same name, www.VenJuvo.com, which is derived from two Greek words meaning “support, assist and delight sellers,” according to the company. This site, too, buys products back from people, though it pays via check, PayPal or Kmart (SHLD) gift card. Users fill out similarly simple questionnaires on each product to help assess value. Unlike Gazelle’s style of mailing boxes to users, VenJuvo gives users only prepaid shipping labels to print out and stick on a box that the customer must supply.

One notable difference between the sites is Gazelle’s broader range of products. In the case of digital cameras, for example, Gazelle accepts 80 brands while VenJuvo takes only Canon (CAJ), Sony (SNE), Olympus and Kodak (EK). Unlike with Gazelle, if you send VenJuvo a product that isn’t worth what you said it was, the company won’t return the product free-of-charge; instead, it will charge you for shipping.

If users choose to receive a gift card, they get a 10% added value. While VenJuvo doesn’t let people donate a product’s value to a cause, it will add this feature next week and will include different causes (like Ronald McDonald House and Big Brothers Big Sisters) than those found on Gazelle.

Unlike Gazelle, VenJuvo will always take items for recycling and will pay for the shipping, regardless of whether you traded something in for a value.

A useful resource for general electronics recycling is the Consumer Electronics Association Web site, www.MyGreenElectronics.org, which locates nearby electronics-recycling centers according to ZIP Code. And almost every computer manufacturer has a recycling program in place; some will even recycle computers that aren’t their own brand.

One way or another, it’s time to clean out the old junk drawer. Just be sure to do some comparison shopping if you want money for your old products.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Write to Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com

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