Battle for Listings Between Realtors and Zillow Group Set to Intensify

There appears to be a battle in the making betweenrnRealtor.com, which has provided on-line nationwide residential listingrninformation since the Internet was only a novelty and upstarts Zillow andrnTrulia.  Both companies have made theirrnown radical changes in the last six months with Realtor.com operator Move Inc.rnbeing sold and Trulia merging into Zillow.</p

Realtor.com’s relationship with the National Association ofrnRealtors has always been a bit opaque. rnStarting in the mid-1990s Move Inc., then called RealSelect but operatingrnprincipally as Homestore (remember those glass boxes with home listingsrnscattered through airport concourses?) began managing listings of Realtorsrnnationwide.  </p

In 1999 the company went public, raising $140 million withrnNAR holding a significant position and Homestore negotiated agreements withrnhundreds of MLSs and brokerages to secure direct feeds of listings.  In 2010, now named Move Inc., it acquired ListHubrnwhich provides MLS and real estate agents with a listing syndication platform. </p

When Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation announced itsrnacquisition of Move Inc. last September, closing the transaction in November, itrnwas unclear whether NAR was still a stockholder.  It owns the Realtor.com domain, however thernsite accepts listings from non-Realtor agents and Move Inc. appears to havernoperated it independently through an agreement withrnthe REALTORS® Information Network, a NAR subsidiary.  NAR did have to sign off on the News Corprnacquisition and said at the time that its two seats of the company’s board ofrndirectors would continue under the new ownership.   </p

Meanwhile, the sale of Trulia to Zillow, a $2.5 billionrnstock-for-stock acquisition, is scheduled to close on February 24.  Last week things started to get a littlernugly.  </p

REALTOR magazine, which is owned andrnoperated by NAR, said that ListHub (the Move Inc. /News Corps subsidiary thatrnprovides list syndication services to Realtors) would no longer send listingsrnto Trulia effective February 26 and Trulia will be removed from ListHub’srnpublisher choices dashboard.)  ListHubrncited the Trulia acquisition as terminating their relationship.   </p

ListHub also announced that its relationship with Zillow wouldrnexpire on April 7 and that Zillow had chosen not to renew it.  For its part, Zillow has filed for arntemporary restraining order to force ListHub to continue serving Trulia under arncontract which does not expire for more than a year.   Apparently Zillow needs the time to completerntransitioning to its own new “Data Dashboard” service through which it hopes tornreceive more listings directly from MLS and from brokers.    </p

While the three soon to be two, aggregators seem to be preparing for battle,rnit is going to be waged against a backdrop of growing unrest among the actualrnowners of the listings, the Realtors themselves.  Announcement of the New Corp acquisition wasrnaccompanied by a lot of dismayed comments from agents, some were unaware thatrnNAR had not been owning and operating Realtor.com all along, and others who expressedrndispleasure about all three listing portals. rn</p

These fell into several categories:  </p<ul class="unIndentedList"<liThe money private companies (including Zillow andrnTrulia) were making off their listings which included selling back leads.</li<liThe manipulation of their data. This included both ways in which it was beingrnused such as allowing paid-for listings to pop up first in searches, delayingrnnew listings for many hours, permitting another agents face to pop up on arnlisting.</li<liA high error rate</li<liAllowing non-realtor members to displayrnlistings, especially on the Realtor.com site.</li</ul

According to an October 2013 article in Realtor magazine some localrnassociations are beginning to take action, converting their existing memberrnsites to public listing portals.  In SanrnFrancisco, for example its Association of Realtors offers only Realtor listingsrnon a locally focused platform without competing advertising and does not sellrnleads. The site also proves local data such as neighborhood descriptions, crimernstates, and school district boundaries and had plans to expand listings tornother Bay Area communities.   Other local portals have recently sprung up inrnCharlotte, Houston, and in Tennessee. rnThe Houston portal claims to attract more unique monthly visitors thanrnany of the three major aggregators.</p

Local associations face a lot of problems in trying to compete with thernaggregators.  For one thing, establishingrna portal is expensive but two new platforms are making it more costrneffective.  One, from Point2 Technologies,rnis cited in the article as making San Francisco’s effort possible.  The second one called Spring, offered byrnSolid Earth, makes the private data platform used by members to list propertiesrninto a public facing platform.  Solid Earthrnis specifically marketing its product as a challenge to Zillow and Trulia.  </p

Potential portals don’t always have support from local Realtor associationrnmembers either.  Many firms, especiallyrnlarger ones, feel they would provide competition to their own sites and levelrnthe field with smaller brokerages.  </p

Perhaps the acquisition of Move Inc. and Trulia, especially if accompaniedrnby a battle for control of the market, will finally prompt large numbers ofrnRealtors as well as the historically fragmented multiple listing organizations,rnto realize that their listings have some real value.  Then the situation could indeed get veryrninteresting.

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