In the past year, major real estate search sites have partnered with media channels like CNNMoney to provide listings to their network. Zillow partnered with Yahoo! Real Estate to be the listings source, Trulia partnered with CNNMoney.com and Move, Inc. (parent company of Realtor.com) renewed their content distribution agreement with MSN.
This week, AOL Real Estate announced that they too will be partnering with Move, Inc. to distribute real estate listings. AOL has made several major moves in this same vein to boost their content, namely purchasing TechCrunch to be their exclusive tech content provider. As AOL’s purchases help their network grow in size, this gives Move, Inc. a network size boost as well.
Beginning in the third quarter of this year, “millions of listings will be syndicated to AOL Real Estate via Move’s ListHub network,” according to Audie Chamberlain, Community Manager at Move, Inc.
So what does this all mean?
As the battle for who’s the biggest continues to heat up, the Move, Inc. network is already the largest and we suspect this partnership will increase its size substantially. We predict that Trulia and Zillow will announce other partnerships this year as well, but with Move, Inc. owning ListHub, they have a natural advantage.
So the landscape for major real estate search companies looks a little like this (with the Realtor as the original source of course):
This does not include all partnerships and of course excludes the smaller real estate search companies, board activity and the like, but this gives you an idea of the changing landscape and a very simplistic view of where your listings are spread to naturally.
We believe that this year will be a big year for announcements of this nature and we’d love to hear what you think in the comments as to which of the big three will be next to announce a partnership?
AG is not affiliated with Zillow, Trulia or any of their partners. Realtor.com, a Move, Inc. company is an advertiser on AG.
