Edina Realty Pulls Its Real Estate Listings from Third Party Aggregators

Edina, Minn. – Nov. 18, 2011 – Edina Realty leadership has decided to pull the company's real estate listings from third party real estate aggregators such as Trulia.com and Realtor.com. Edina Realty will no longer list its properties on Trulia.com starting Nov. 30, and Realtor.com in the "near" future.

"We're confident that our decision to pull our listings from Trulia.com and Realtor.com is the right one for consumers as well as our agents and brokerage," said Bob Peltier, president and CEO of Edina Realty Home Services. "Our clients are number one. And we have an obligation to represent them according to a specific code of ethics and state law. That means we are invested in the integrity of the information we publish on their behalf. The inaccuracies we've seen on third-party aggregator sites give us cause for alarm, and the reality is that we are no longer willing to surrender our business – or the consumer's real estate experience – to third party aggregators, who are not required to operate under the same rules and laws as brokers."

"Furthermore, it's not my concern what other brokers are doing with their listings; they own them. That is why we haven't made a public statement about this until now. I understand that some brokers may not be in a leadership position and able to break ties with national aggregators, but Edina Realty is," he said. The company fully participates in listing information sharing known as broker reciprocity with other brokers in its markets. That means all brokers publish each others listings to their websites to give consumers a full database of properties. "But these other brokers are required to play by the same rules and code of ethics that we are, and they also value the accuracy of their information," Peltier added.

Peltier believes that non-broker sites such as Trulia.com and Realtor.com have created confusion for consumers. Inquiries to these sites are sometimes routed to agents who know nothing about the property and may not even be familiar with the neighborhood. These agents may not have the support, ability or desire to respond to a property inquiry within 30 minutes, whereas Edina Realty has a local, fully-staffed Customer Service team available seven days a week to help customers and support Edina Realty agents. What's more, the property information itself is sometimes even incorrect or outdated on third-party aggregator sites, and consumers may not even be able to tell who the actual listing agent is - the most knowledgeable resource for the property. According to a recent data quality study conducted by Trulia.com and published on Inman.com, 69 percent of errors in online real estate listings information were directly related to third party syndication of information by non-MLS sources.

"We don't rely on national sites for business. We drive our own business, and we have the analytics to prove it," Peltier said. "We already know that edinarealty.com is the most popular real estate website in our region, and we look forward to concentrating our efforts on continuing to maintain our strong presence while providing consumers with accurate information and a superior real estate experience."

Edina Realty, a subsidiary of HomeServices of America, is one of the nation's largest real estate companies with approximately 60 real estate offices throughout Minnesota, North Dakota and western Wisconsin and nearly 2,100 REALTORS®. Edina Realty's family of companies includes Edina Realty, Edina Realty Title, and Edina Realty Mortgage. Edina Realty handled more than 25,000 transactions and $5.3 billion in sales volume in 2010. For more information, visit www.edinarealty.comor find us on Facebook: facebook.com/EdinaRealty; and Twitter: Twitter/Edina_Realty.