Yep, thats exactly what the sales rep for Trulia.com told me as he was hanging up the phone after a failed attempt to sell me advertising.
Im not sure what irritated Travis (Trulia sales rep) more, the two weeks he spent hounding my assistant to get my attention just to end up with no deal, or the fact that I called Trulia a competitor.
Agents have been debating and ranting about Trulias web savvy tricks and widgets for years. And for good reason, especially since Travis said that Trulia is about to overtake Realtor.com as the number one real estate site on the Internet.
Ive been sitting on this post for a few days to make sure I didnt turn it into a Trulia bashing session just because one of their representatives was rude.
However, something definitely had to be said. Its bad enough that Ive lost valuable web rankings over the past few years to Trulia and similar sites, but now they are personally calling and rubbing it in over the phone.
We get sales calls all day long from SEO gurus, web design firms and vendors like Trulia trying to tell us that their web traffic solution magic bullet will help us generate more leads.
Since Im busy running a property management and real estate company, my assistant helps field calls throughout the day to make sure were able to address the most important issues first.
Obviously, clients come before sales reps and we have a lot of clients. Which ironically enough in this particular situation, 94% of our new business comes from the web.
Apparently Travis wasnt happy with the level of priority we were giving our clients calls over him, so after several tries he finally asked my assistant if I was really out of the office or just avoiding him.
After Travis told me about how much traffic Trulia receives and that theyll be bumping Realtor.com as the #1 used real estate site on the Internet, I told him I dont use Trulia or similar sites for advertising.
Travis quickly interjected and said, I know why you dont use Zillow, but why wouldnt you use Trulia?
Before I could answer, he said that he was reviewing my profile on Trulia and noticed that I have received several leads, but I could get more with an upgrade.
I began to explain to him that I wont spend any money to generate business from my competitors, at which he took offense to stating that Trulia is not a competitor.
My opinion is that anyone who ranks against me in the search engines for the same target audience is a competitor.
Now that Trulia has bumped me from many of my key organic spots, I have a hard time paying them anything for the same leads I was getting before they came to our town.
I explained that I am not a new agent trying to generate leads, and how I have a large web presence that I have been building for over 10 years. So, I have a different outlook on sites like Trulia then newer agents or agents with no web presence.
Travis said that he really appreciated my feedback and as he hung up.
- If youre an agent helping Trulias SEO by placing their widgets on your site, then its your fault that theyre blowing us out of the water
- Anyone trying to reach your target audience online with a similar product / service is a competitor
- If the rest of Trulias sales reps are as prideful and rude as Travis, then they should clean house
From an SEO / publishing perspective, I think Trulia has done a good job competing against us in the search engines.
But, As Rob Hann points out in this post about competing with the Big Guys for SEO:
Why is competing with Zillow, Trulia, Realtor.com, and so on nearly impossible? Why is hyperlocal so much the point of agent blogging?
The answer, to me, seems to be that when a Big Company decides that it wants to compete in SEO for some desirable keywords, it will simply outspend the little guy and just crush him. The focus on hyperlocal and “long tail” strikes me as the result: small companies and individual agents pick up the crumbs that the big guys let fall from the table.
In other words, their SEObased strategies are viable only insofar as some Big Guy allows it to be viable.
Regardless of whether or not Trulia decides to blow us out of the water on either trophy phrase or hyperlocal searches, I still believe that homebuyers will have more options for searching homes online with a Real Estate Agents site that is integrated with a killer IDX solution.
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