RealtyTrac Cuts Workforce, Refocuses

Reports emerged last week saying that US online foreclosure marketplace RealtyTrac had laid off up to 30 staff members. These rumours have now been confirmed by RealtyTrac Senior Vice President Rick Sharga.

Sharga is quoted on Inman News as saying the cuts did not involve senior managers and took place on a selective basis across the company in underutilised areas of the business, or where the company had “deeper bench support”. The staff cuts leave the company with approximately 100 employees.

RealtyTrac has announced many partnerships with agents and other websites over the past months but it seems these are also under threat with Sharga telling Inman that the company is pushing away from “some media partnerships that drove traffic to the site but were deemed ‘not profitable’”.

A recent propertyportalwatch.com article ranked RealtyTrac number 9 in a list of the top 25 revenue generating portals worldwide, with an estimated revenue of US $50 million.

Meanwhile VendorAlley, the blog that broke the news, has quoted figures from compete.com that it argues shows RealtyTrac has suffered a loss of visitors since April this year. Figures from hitwise.com show RealtyTrac has slid down the rankings from 10th place last November to 18th place this August.

Although Sharga confirmed that traffic was a problem, he focused on talking about future plans for the website, including increasing “organic” traffic from search engines, diversifying its revenue stream with programs like the RealtyTrac Agent Network and investigating other opportunities for growth in advertising and sales of data to businesses like mortgage companies, hedge funds and housing analysts.

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