The Proof: Big Portals Don't Work for Selling Homes

The proof is in for San Diego County home buyers and sellers along with the rest of the country – big real estate web portals aren't working…

If you are shopping for homes for sale in San Diego County or want to increase the odds of selling your home in Rancho Santa Fe, La Jolla or Encinitas fast and for top dollar you are officially better off using a local Realtor and their website.

Consider the following insights from the biggest portal's latest financial reports covered by Inman News…

Trulia claims a big improvement by reducing its fourth quarter 2012 losses to $1.6 million. If that's good news for shareholders, there is clearly is serious issue.

Out of an estimated 1 million real estate agents nationwide (a number that is no doubt ballooning as the market improves), Zillow claims less than 30,000 subscribers and Trulia has even less. So despite the hype, agents are clearly voting with their wallets and are not convinced the platforms are actually helping to sell homes.

Perhaps, scariest for shareholders should be that Zillow reportedly blew $50 million in trying to attract new customers last year, yet only managed to increase subscribers by 13,674. That's a ridiculously high cost of acquiring a new customer. In other words they had to fork over $3,000 each to get agents to spend a little over $200 on their monthly service. That can't be sustainable.

Of course this is all in addition to the complaints that many of homes on these sites really aren't for sale, and many of the best listings are no longer going to these sites as real estate brokerages halt syndication. So expect dwindling results in future.

One thing they are bullish on is hope for developing mobile search tools for buyers.

So you can wait and hope they get better at this or you can just hop on to SanDiegoRealEstateBuzz.com from your iPad or smartphone and enjoy a robust and highly accurate home search tool that offers all of the best homes in San Diego and is updated every 3 hours right now!

So whether looking for property in Rancho Santa Fe, La Jolla or Encinitas, try SanDiegoRealEstateBuzz.com, set up your home search and get notifications the instant new properties that meet your criteria come online, and be the first to bid and scoop them up.

Plus of course this all makes this site better for sellers that want to draw serious buyers that are qualified so they can sell fast too!