The real estate industry has never felt the need to create a powerful search portal in response to Zillow. There should have been an industry-wide effort to create a realtor-centric website to support our business, but NAR and others just shrugged it off.
Traditional realtors should be demonstrating why our experience, our advice, and our gravitas is a better solution for consumers.
It starts with realtors having the best real estate search portal – and Compass has committed to producing it! Our website will make it clear who the actual listing agent is on each listing, regardless of company.
There is another benefit – we put our Coming Soon listings in the front of the search, which will hopefully cause consumers to keep coming back, and help build the traffic faster.
From our CEO:
The future of the real estate industry will be defined by the company that creates the best experience for buying and selling a home. I believe Compass is going to be that company. To achieve our mission of helping everyone find their place in the world, we must make it as simple and straightforward as possible for people to navigate the process of buying and selling a home. We must also put the person who knows how to create a world-class customer experience front and center: the agent.
Many technology companies are doing the exact opposite. They’re confusing consumers and taking advantage of agents in order to maximize their own profits. They most commonly do this by hiding the true listing agent and monetizing the client lead in a variety of ways.
At Compass, we are not just looking to elevate ourselves, we are looking to elevate the industry. Being the first company to show the true listing agent on every listing will not only help bring clarity to the home-buying process, but it is the right thing to do.
It is part of a 3-step strategy to win the consumer:
- Make the Compass website and mobile app just as good as the best aggregators by end of summer 2019
- Invest millions of dollars advertising our Coming Soon inventory to consumers around the country
- Put the listing agent on every listing, making Compass.com the only site in the country where consumers can always find the listing agent
It means we are gently nudging consumers towards connecting with the listing agents directly, making that trend more obvious to all. If the business is going that way anyway, we might as well be out in front of it. JtR
I don’t understand. Redfin already does this. The listing agent is displayed on every listing. It will take a long time for Compass to build out a comparable experience with Zillow and Redfin. Their search portal is awful. You can’t hire engineers fast enough.
We’ll see – it is a work in progress.
Redfin only cares about Redfin, and Glenn said he wants to beat our brains in. The NRT guy called us names. The war is on now.
At least we are trying to create something that could help everyone.