Originally posted by @Patrick Connell:
Originally posted by @John Rooster:
Originally posted by @Joe Delia:
Originally posted by @John Rooster:
Not only is a doable its being done already.
If there is a metro area that Zillow and Trulia can not service because they are being stonewalled by the local MLS please name it. I would like to research this more.
Austin, starting May 1.
A piece of a newsletter sent out a month ago from ABOR:
"Last week, the ABoR Board of Directors voted to return decisions regarding listings syndication to brokers by agreeing to terminate ABoR’s relationship with ListHub after April 30, 2014, and stated its intention to cease facilitating the syndication of members’ listing data to non-REALTOR® consumer websites. After April 30, 2014, brokers will choose independently whether to provide data to non-REALTOR® consumer websites on a case-by-case basis as dictated by clients’ and agents’ best interests."
That is interesting to see how this goes moving forward, if more and more are choosing not to syndicate.
First, I believe it affects much more than just sites like zillow, trulia, realtytrac etc...many of the brokerage owned web sites with a "Find my home" or "Search for home" button would be crippled or fragmented in the same manner. The sites like Floridahomes.com, Weichert.com, Remax.com etc...and a whole bunch others I believe used the same technology to mine the data for their search engines. Their clients wanting to do their own preliminary searches and once they zero in on a half dozen of homes they contact the realtors to arrange visits and personal services, these clients would have hit and miss access to what's available.
Second, and as someone who have architected a few commercial engineering automation systems in the past, this will not really stop anything. All it does is it will cost zillow or trulia more to get the same data. Instead of being able to have direct access via listhub to the listing data, all they have to do is to pay a realtor with access to perform automated searches at a regular interval and get the electronic search results. I am pretty sure many of you set up searches for your clients, based on price range, how many bed, bath, location, pool, garage etc...and your clients get email digests with new changes immediately, every day, twice a week etc? Well they could arrange for the same search with no filter at all to be created, so they get updates on new listings, status changes by email. Then all they need to do is to write a simple parser to follow the pattern of these information in the email updates and aggregate into their database. It won't stop anything, These are road blocks that can be easily overcome.
Third, I believe these sites are investing heavily into property rentals, an area where the information source is not so dominated by mls like sales. In rental you have a lot of property that's listed organically on these web sites, who syndicate to each other, as well as Craigslist and many other hybrid marketplace/social web sites. Not being able to get rental listing data from mls will cause a further fragmentation for landlords and renters. Craigslist is already an island by itself as it doesn't allow syndication. Now if a renter goes to a site like zillow to look for rental availability they don't care if the property may be on mls, on zillow, or syndicated from somewhere. If they now need to go to CL, then to an agent to look for mls listed rentals, and to zillow or trulia to look for the rest of them, it's more hassle for the end consumers. I could be wrong I think in this case they would look at zillow and CL listings first, then the mls listed rentals last as that may be the least convenient.
There's probably more impacts than what I listed those are just some that's off the top of my head.
