There’s more to agents than listings, photos, phone numbers and email addresses. There’s also completed deals.
A new feature on Trulia ties registered agents to the homes they’ve helped consumers buy or sell. Consumers can scroll through an agent’s profile page on Trulia and see transactions they’ve been involved in.
Where applicable, agents’ names and contact info will also show up on the "price history" section of property detail pages — whether a home is currently for sale or not.
Matt Holder, a product manager at Trulia, explains some of the feature’s inspiration and shares screenshots of how it looks on the site.
Registered agents can "claim" their role in deals past — even sales that closed 20 or more years ago — said Matt Holder, a product manager at Trulia. Going forward, closed transactions will automatically populate a "sold" slider on agents’ profile pages, he said.
Past deals will become "verified" when the corresponding agent who represented the other side of the deal acknowledges the other agent’s claim. Regardless of whether the other agent responds to the approval, the property will show up on the agent’s profile.
A "verified" deal, however, will help an agent rank higher in Trulia’s local agent directory, which some consumers use to shop for agents, Holder said. The rankings also take into account the total number of deals claimed and other factors, he said.
Registration is free and Trulia — the second-most visited U.S. listing portal — currently has about 400,000 agents who are active, registered site users, Holder said.
One impetus for the new feature was to give buyer’s agents some added clout on their profile pages via the properties they’ve helped close on. If they weren’t representing homes for sale, buyer’s agents, unlike listing agents, previously had no properties or deals associated with their profiles on the site, Holder said.
In addition to allowing agents to claim properties they’ve helped buy or sell, Trulia is also experimenting with letting agents attach comments about the deal to the properties they claim. The feature is currently in beta, Holder said — agents can make comments, but the portal is not publishing them at the moment.
(Last month, brokerage Redfin began publishing "Offer Insights" providing buyers and sellers with insight into the negotiations that take place when the firm’s clients submit offers to buy a home.)
Trulia today also announced a new profile feature that allows agents to see who has viewed their profile, along with splits that show how many viewers looked a profile in the last few days and for the lifetime of the profile. Those registered on Trulia, including consumers, show up in the profile view identified as homebuyer, seller or real estate pro along with the city their profile says they’re in. Unregistered users show up as "Trulia User."
Screen shot of the profile view feature on an agent’s Trulia profile page.
The profile views show up as a list in descending order of when they occurred and include what city users have conducted home searches in and which types of properties they’ve looked at.
