VHT’s New White Paper Featured in AllThingsD.com

VHT’s new white paper, “Friend or Foe? The Battle with Third Party Aggregators,” is the subject of an interesting article today by Senior Editor Tricia Duryee of the Dow Jones digital news Web site, AllThingsD.com.  The story says that The Internet has forever changed the newspaper industry, the music business and travel agencies. Now it’s real estate’s turn The Internet has forever changed the newspaper industry, the music business and travel agencies. Now it’s real estate’s turn The Internet has forever changed the newspaper industry, the music business and travel agencies. Now it’s real estate’s turn The Internet has forever changed the newspaper industry, the music business and travel agencies. Now it’s real estate’s turnthe Internet has forever changed the newspaper business, music industry and travel agencies.  Now it’s real estate’s turn.  As sites like Zillow and Trulia have risen in prominence, real estate professionals are starting to push back, especially as they find it difficult to live without them.

The story quotes the author of the white paper, VHT CEO Alex Zoghlin, who says that “as an industry, brokerages have done a poor job of making themselves and their Web content visible to search engines.”

VHT’s white paper explains that brokers’ competition isn’t the brokerage down the street – it’s 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 sales leads.  In the real estate industry, big online aggregators have grown so huge that most brokerage websites simply can’t compete with them for search engine visitors.  Aggregators are like vampires sucking the blood out of brokers’ online marketing efforts.

No wonder there’s an escalating firestorm over real estate aggregators.   These third party sites are using brokers’ most valuable assets to make money, build their businesses and divert customers away.

Like the travel industry a decade ago, brokerages are at a tipping point in their digital marketing evolution. Some leading brokers, such as Edina Realty and Shorewest, recently weighed the pros and cons and decided to stop sharing their listings with aggregators.  They’ve discovered that an effective website strategy can provide more online leads at a lower overall cost.