Key Takeaways for Sellers
- The Problem: Portals like Zillow often route buyer inquiries to random agents ("Lead Diversion").
- The Solution: Oliver Realty's partnership with Homes.com ensures "Your Listing, Your Lead."
- The Benefit: The expert who knows your home (us) answers the buyer's questions, not a stranger.
Is Your Home Listing Being "Hijacked"?
(The Dirty Secret of Online Real Estate)
You decide to sell your Tucson home. You hire an agent. They take photos, put it on the MLS, and suddenly it appears on the big national real estate portals.
A qualified buyer sees your stunning kitchen online. They get excited. They click the big "Contact Agent" button right next to your listing.
That buyer probably didn’t just connect with your agent. They were likely routed to a completely random agent who simply paid the portal the most money to "hijack" the incoming leads on your listing.
At Oliver Realty, we think that’s a broken system. And if you want top dollar for your home, you should too.
The "Traffic Trap": Why Portals Sell Your Leads
Big real estate websites are advertising platforms. Their business model is simple: they take the free data (about your house) and use it to capture buyer leads. They then sell those leads to the highest bidder.
The result? A buyer who was interested in your home gets pitched on 5 other listings because the agent on the phone doesn't know the answers to their questions about your property.
How Oliver Realty Ended the "Hijack"
When you hire us, you hire us to handle the negotiations. Why would anyone want a stranger handling the critical first point of contact?
We have executed a strategic partnership with Homes.com to guarantee the "Your Listing, Your Lead" standard.
- Inquiries come directly to Oliver Realty.
- No "Random Agent" interference.
- We answer questions about your home instantly.
World-Class Marketing Requires a Plan
Getting the highest possible price for your home isn't about luck; it’s about exposure and control. Our partnership ensures your property utilizes premium placements, high-resolution visual tools, and massive traffic drivers (100M+ visitors).
Other agents have a listing. Oliver Realty has a marketing campaign.
What is "listing hijacking" in real estate?
"Listing hijacking" is a term used to describe when major real estate portals (like Zillow, Trulia, or Realtor.com) reroute potential homebuyers away from the actual listing agent. Instead of connecting directly with the expert hired to sell the home, the buyer is often directed to an advertising agent who paid for the lead but may have never visited the property.
How does the Zillow business model affect my home sale?
The Zillow business model generally focuses on selling user data to agents who buy advertising space by zip code. In Tucson, agents may pay approximately $1,200 to $1,500 per connection. While this is profitable for the portal and the advertising agent, it disadvantages the seller because the inquiry is handled by someone whose primary goal is acquiring a new buyer client, not necessarily selling your specific listing.
What is the "Your Listing, Your Lead" model?
"Your Listing, Your Lead" is the philosophy used by Homes.com and adopted by Oliver Realty. This model ensures that when a buyer inquires about a home online, that lead goes directly to the listing broker or agent who knows the property best. This allows the listing agent to control the sales environment and qualify buyers accurately.
Why is controlling the sales channel important for luxury homes?
Controlling the sales channel is critical to preventing brand dilution and ensuring a high-quality experience, similar to how luxury brands like Rolex or Louis Vuitton strictly control their authorized dealers. By managing the inventory directly, Oliver Realty ensures that high-value listings are not "fumbled" by inexperienced agents who cannot properly convey the home's value or features.
How does Oliver Realty market homes in Tucson?
Oliver Realty treats every listing as a luxury product. The process includes:
- Styling & Prep: Addressing issues that could reduce pricing power before listing.
- High-End Visuals: Using multiple professional photographers for architectural shots, drone footage, and VR tours.
- Direct Lead Handling: Partnering with Homes.com to ensure inquiries are handled by Michael or Heather Oliver directly.
How can I contact Oliver Realty in Tucson?
You can reach Michael Oliver at Oliver Realty by calling 520-800-8922 or visiting OliverRealty.net to see past sales and current inventory.
Click here to read the full audio transcript
[00:00] In today's episode, we're going to be talking about: is your home listing being hijacked? Meaning, are these big website portals like Zillow.com, Realtor.com, Trulia.com—there's probably a hundred more of them—are they using the information provided about your home one, to their advantage, and two, to potentially your disadvantage because the buyers that are interested in your home are being rerouted or hijacked, as what we call it.
[00:30] I'm Michael Oliver with Oliver Realty, and it's a pretty interesting discussion to look into. Most home sellers have no idea about any of this. So hopefully, we'll shine some light on it and let you understand what the real estate marketing, real estate listing or marketing of a listing looks like in 2026.
[00:52] So, okay, if you're selling a house or maybe you've sold a house in the past, uh, as long as it's been since about 1999, your home is going to go online. It's going to become an online listing. And that looks different today than what it looked like even five years ago, but predominantly most people are interested in their house being shown on Zillow, Realtor.com—we call these portals—uh, basically, they're places where a high percentage of the buyers go to look at real estate information. And Homes.com would also be in that portal, uh, category.
[01:28] So let's say a buyer goes online, they look at home listings. Uh, if they're on Zillow, what happens? Well, Zillow's business model is mostly predicated—and it's been changing over the years, they're trying to diversify this—but it's mostly predicated on selling the user's information to advertisers, meaning realtors. That information is extremely valuable. Somebody that just clicked a button saying that they want to see this home for sale is a high-intent, high interest level person, and there is the ability to generate revenue off of them by selling them a house.
[02:10] So whether it's the house they click the button on or called on, or a different house, it doesn't really matter so much on the advertising side. It matters more on the client retention side, getting a new client if you're a realtor. And Zillow charges for this information. So they have a couple different models in Tucson as far as I know, and we have not advertised on Zillow in a very long time, so some of this information may be not quite right, but it's close. And if it's different now, it's recently changed. My understanding is that on Zillow in Tucson, you buy zip codes. So 85718, 85750, 85737, 85755, whatever zip code you want as a real estate broker or agent. And you pay so much money per connection.
[03:00] So depending upon the zip code, the pricing typically is like in those zip codes I mentioned, uh, approximately $1,200, maybe $1,500 per connection. So if a buyer clicks the button to tour, you know, "I want to tour this house in Catalina Foothills 85718," and uh, you know, if I were buying ads, I would be spending probably approximately $1,500 for that one button click. Now, the buyer may already have a realtor, the buyer may not even be that serious, they may be out of state, they may not be able to qualify. I mean, there's a lot of questions that are just simply unknown when that event, that button click or that tour request comes in.
[03:45] But that's part of the deal. That revenue, that commission could be worth $20,000, $30,000, you know, I'd say probably in that ballpark for that zip code is very realistic. So you're talking a 10x on your money, maybe a 20x, uh, just depending. So most advertisers, most realtors who have high sales skills and experience will take that deal and just uh, you know, you can make money out of it for sure.
[04:12] So anyways, how does this help you as a home listing or as a seller of a house trying to get your home sold? And I would argue it doesn't help you at all. Because the buyers, yeah, they see your house, but they're being routed to a different, usually—not always, but usually—a different company, a different agent. It's not 99.9—well, not 99.9, but a high percentage of the time it's not going to be the person you hired to sell your house. It's going to be somebody you've never heard of or on some team. And now they're the ones that are handling this inquiry. Which is strange, but that's the business model.
[04:47] And I think where it originates from is back in the day, 20 years ago, a lot of listing agents did not take the internet that seriously. So therefore if somebody emailed them or called them and they said they saw this house online, they basically didn't really waste too much time and energy on that buyer lead. And so the internet companies—Zillow to be specific, and Realtor.com—they decided "Let's sell this information to somebody who's going to do something with it, and then the users will get a better experience, they'll have more engagement, and um, we don't have to worry about actually making a sale. We just have to bring the traffic in," which they're really good at.
[05:22] So anyways, that's the business model. That's online leads, portals, uh in 2026. And what's interesting is there is a company out there, it's called Homes.com, and we partner with them um exclusively to handle our online marketing platform for our listings, and we've seen phenomenal results. They said that's dumb. That's not the right business model for the, you know, 2024—they started doing this about 2023—but uh they said that's wrong. Why are we going to do it that way? Um, it's bad for the user. You know, they think they're talking to the listing agent most of the time. The person who's handling that lead is not probably the best source, meaning they don't really know—they probably never even been in the house or they might not even know where the house is. Or if they just get an inquiry that says "This person wants to see this house" or has questions about this specific home.
[06:15] So what they did is they said "We're going to have 'Your Listing, Your Lead.'" And what that means is if you're a realtor, if you're a real estate broker like like I am, then you can promote your homes online with a world-class platform. And as those inquiries come in, then you can handle them directly. You can qualify them directly. You can sell the fit and features of the property that you're, you know, that you have listed. You're controlling the sales environment.
[06:42] And we think that that is certainly the highest quality way to sell a product, for sure. It's the most time intensive, you know, arguably costs the most. Um, it's not the most efficient—you know, it's far more efficient for me to let somebody else go sell our listings because, you know, I'm not doing it and they are. But for end point, bottom-line results, whenever I can control my inventory and whenever I can position it and sell it and make sure that I'm, you know, doing the whole process, it's simply going to result—in my opinion—it's going to result in a better net sale for you as a seller.
[07:20] And there's a lot of evidence that would support what I just said. Um, case in point is, okay, Rolex. They use authorized dealers, ADs, and um they control the whole sales environment for the Rolex product. There's not very many of these dealers. They're very—Rolex is very selective about who gets their inventory and what the the minimum requirements are for them to even qualify for that. So they're controlling their sales environment, their sales channel. They don't sell online, they don't do they don't do anything like most people most companies would do, especially in the luxury segment. Uh, but that creates the highest level of control over their brand, their products, their service, uh all of it.
[08:08] And you see that in in several high-end luxury product companies. Uh, Louis Vuitton is another, you know, channel—they control several—they control a lot of different brands, but it's the same sort of way that they want to really be in charge of their product all the way through. Um, and you see that also in, you know, Ferrari, Porsches—it's just it's just the best way to do it. Now, it's the most expensive way to do it like I mentioned, because it's just easier and cheaper and you don't have to have as much brain power if you just throw your stuff out to everywhere and uh see who picks it up. But from a pricing power standpoint, you're going to have a hard time with that because not everyone's going to hold the same quality that you need, uh and not everyone's going to service the customer in the same aspect that's that's required. So you're just going to get, in my opinion, brand dilution.
[09:00] So again, back to: how does this do anything for your house? Well, when Oliver Realty takes a listing on, we are looking at that house as a luxury product. You know, even if it's let's say a $300,000 home. $300,000 is still something that very few people are just spending on a daily basis or even on a yearly basis. So when we take on one of these—one of our listings, when we take you on as a client—we're going to go through the whole stack of: We're going to style the house. We're going to make sure it looks proper. If there's any major issues or even minor issues that we think are going to derail a sale or derail your pricing power, we're going to address it. We're going to—we actually have multiple photo sessions, professional photographers. We have more than one that goes to your house. We have an architectural photographer, and she's going to do a VR tour and drones so that online on Homes.com platform, we can just shine. And then we're going to have another photographer who also has drones and, you know, pro-level photography equipment. And then that person helps us with our publications, our magazines, the MLS listings. We're going to optimize all that.
[10:15] What we do not want to do is once we do all this curation and all this getting ready to go on market and and presenting the the property at an extremely high level, we don't want the buyers that show up—which are probably extremely high quality buyers—to get fumbled with other real estate brokerages or or agents. You know, maybe it's some, you know, relatively new agent who doesn't know much about anything and can't sell your house at the level that it should be sold at. Just like a lot of these uh jewelry companies cannot handle the Rolex requirements, so therefore they don't get Rolex inventory. Same sort of kind of thing.
[10:52] So we don't control every channel, you know, on Earth obviously. But with the Homes.com platform, we definitely feel like at Oliver Realty we are taking back a lot of the control that for the last several years has been watered down across the board. Uh, if it were up to me there—our listings probably wouldn't even necessarily be online except at OliverRealty.net. Again, that's not realistic, but that's kind of that's the level that we're thinking about what we're doing and how we're positioning our our properties.
[11:20] So if you have questions about this, again, my name's Michael Oliver at Oliver Realty. You can give us a call, phone number is 520-800-8922, or you can go to our website OliverRealty.net. You can see some of our past sales, um, just our inventory of work. We've been selling homes—I've been selling houses since I was 18. Uh my wife Heather, she's been doing it since she was 19. You know, we've sold lots and lots and lots of houses, but we've really thought about this at a high level and we continue to develop what we're doing because technology is changing. Um people's attention spans have probably always been short, but being able to get your product in in their mind is really a marketing uh equation you have to crack in today's world.
[12:00] So you know, with us, that's that's what you get. So again, if you have questions: Oliver Realty. Hope you enjoyed this, hope you got something out of this. And uh if you have questions just give us a call. Thank you so much, have a great day.
