Realtors Ad Dollars Funding the FSBO Way?

Anyone searching for a home or trying to sell a property in Chicago is probably familiar with the Tribune's Sunday real estate section, recently renamed Chicago Homes. Real estate agents and home sellers rely on the classified space provided by this section to advertise; and house hunters look to these pages for updated info on listing and housing market news. While individual home sellers (For Sale By Owners) do contribute to the ad sales collected by the newspaper for real estate listings, the bread and butter of the paper's home advertisements are from real estate agencies and residential developers. In addition to property listings, Chicago Homes features a few articles on local market conditions, personal stories of area buyers/sellers, or some other related scoops about the city's real estate industry.

This past Sunday, on the front page of the Tribune's real estate section was the article "Going Solo vs. Hiring an Agent." Greg Healy, the VP of operations for a prominent FSBO website, is quoted several times with tidbits of discouragement against using real estate agents when selling your home, such as "Hiring an agent is a luxury that many people cannot afford" and "No one needs an agent, is what we tell people." This is a free press and Healy is entitled to say what he likes, but what doesn't quite add up was a later reference to Healy's website that revealed his company is actually owned by the Tribune Co. This is a paper that depends on the professional real estate industry for hundreds of thousands of dollars weekly in advertising revenue and it purposefully established an online company that deems the services provided by those much-needed advertising clients to be unnecessary and valueless. What if every real estate agency and developer that uses the Tribune's classified ads decided not to work with a newspaper that has such an investment in their contrary interests? Might prompt the Tribune to rethink who they support with that steady ad income...