We just heard from the folks at Realtor.com that they’ve renewed their agreement with MSN to be the sole provider of real estate listings and content for the media portal.  The agreement has been ongoing for 7 years, and strengthens one of their bases of reliable consumer traffic.

This is one of many partnerships we’re seeing between large real estate portals and other media portals online.  Zillow supplies real estate listing for Yahoo.  Trulia powers the real estate searches at CNNMoney.  Move, Inc (which manages Realtor.com) runs the AOL real estate search.

While SEO and top rankings in search results are obviously important to the larger real estate sites, this secondary tactic for driving traffic is much more of a traditional business approach.  Find a good market of consumers, and negotiate an air-tight agreement with the market’s owner to keep all eyeballs on your product.  In this scenario, there’s no need to convince the consumer to use your website organically.  Just tie up the medium where they already spend their time.

These agreements give a real estate portal a sort of “walled garden” to work within when consumers are searching on the large media sites.  There are no competitors in sight, just a familiar, structured platform with the opportunity to engage its inhabitants.  The tactics for interacting with these consumers can be less-focused on avoiding the quick bounce rates that often come from SERP-sourced visitors.

The consumers on a media portal will already be comfortable with their surroundings and will likely be repeat visitors without much prodding.  The real estate portal gains the inherent trust that the media portal has already earned with that consumer, and the barrier to converting those consumers is much lower for the real estate portal.  The consumer just needs to be fairly satisfied to continue using this platform for their real estate search, as opposed to the consumer who is “shopping around” for real estate sites in the search engines and expects to find something particularly unique.

Interestingly, even very small media sites are getting in on the act.  Zillow’s is now working with ultra-micro neighborhood news sites like Patch.com.  Some of these news sites serve communities of less than 10,000 residents, but the listings are tailored to that community.  The smaller the city, the less likely there is a serious media competitor.  The ability to be lean and locally customized for a market that probably feels unloved by the major media outlets can certainly create brand loyalty.

This all makes sense as the amount of money invested in real estate portals has exploded in recent years.  They began as edgy start-ups with creative ideas and the freedom to make a lot of mistakes.  They did a lot of really amazing things along the way, and consumer adoption was always the goal.  When companies go public and have shareholders, though, the tactics of management usually add a bit more “gravel” to the mix.  Locking down portions of the market through negotiations, contracts, and money can be just as effective for gaining eyeballs and corporate profits as focusing on organic consumer adoption.

This battle for the eyeballs in the web’s walled gardens will be intensifying, whether it’s for agreements with the ever-consolidating media companies online, or with new social media venues.  Getting exclusive real estate content supply contracts will allow real estate portals to deliver their messages to an easily-convinced consumer base in a competitor-free environment, an implicitly easier task than growing through organic SEO.  Money, clout, and creativity will allow them to do both.