Earlier this month, Trulia announced their “Trulia Direct Reference” system, a “quality assurance system” wherein the new system identifies data discrepancies between the MLS data provided by third party syndicators and other sources not related to the MLS and reports the discrepancies directly to the MLS, broker and listing agent.
This effort went widely ignored by traditional and untraditional news outlets and made few waves. We find this to be unfortunate. Some privately claimed it was just a PR stunt, but it’s a bigger effort than most national sites have made toward data accuracy.
With this new RE/MAX agreement, Trulia is inching closer to accurate with their data. According to Trulia, “As part of the agreement, RE/MAX agents and brokers receive partner benefits on Trulia’s hyper-local marketing and advertising solutions, Trulia Pro and Trulia Local Ads.”
The two companies outline in a public statement the value and merits of the partnership. We choose to focus on the potential for more data accuracy as national brokers continue to partner with real estate search portals. The problem of third party vendors getting bad data and duplicate data has not been completely resolved, but it is refreshing to see companies taking the problem more seriously than in the past.
