Tension mounts as leaders of top listing portals talk real estate's future [VIDEO]

Trulia CEO Pete Flint, realtor.com President Errol Samuelson, Zillow Chief Operating Officer Greg Schwartz, Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman and Forbes real estate reporter Morgan Brennan discussed the future of real estate in one of the most charged sessions so far at Real Connect San Francisco.

With the large real estate search portals beginning to offer more tech tools to agents in the last year — Zillow began offering IDX websites to agents last May, Trulia signed a definitive agreement to buy agent software provider giant Market Leader in March, and realtor.com acquired customer relationship management platform TigerLeads Solutions last September — they’re beginning to overlap with brokerages in those spaces.

Real Estate Connect San Francisco 2013 “The Industry Destiny: Imagine Your Industry in 2018” panel (35:04).

“There’s a schizm in the industry,” Kelman said. “(Some agents are asking) what am I paying my broker for?” he said, which led to a charged moment on the panel between him and Flint.

Schwartz and Samuelson, despite the overlap in the services their firms perform with other portals, brokers and multiple listing services, said Zillow and realtor.com are working to develop open platforms that will allow the integration of data and info like leads from their platforms to those of brokers’.

Predictive analytics, the personal, functional part of “big data,” where firms track consumer habits and deliver better-quality and different types of leads to agents and a better experience to consumers, is the wave of the future, Samuelson said.

Flint and Schwartz, highlighting Trulia’s predictive search tool Trulia Suggests and Zillow’s focus on developing products that take into account the emerging technology surrounding the “quantified self,” agreed.

After nearly 20 years, it’s about time for the industry to move beyond just presenting listings on the Internet, Samuelson said.

A march to more transparency, Brennan said, is her big “takeaway” when she looks into real estate’s future.

Samuelson agreed. For example, it’s only a matter of time before consumers have agent-performance information, he said.