Online real estate portal Zillow is opening access to its Postlets service, making formerly paid features free to users – a move which has some local real estate players wondering what the Internet behemoth’s intentions are for its newly acquired syndication platform.

The move is the latest skirmish in a battle over syndication which has the potential to shape the future of the real estate industry.

Syndication – taking listing information and automatically posting it around the web on sites other than that of the broker selling the listing – has proved a contentious issue in recent months. In May, at the National Association of Realtors’ (NAR) mid-year meeting, the question of whether or not real estate franchisors could serve as syndication sites for all listings in all franchisee markets caused considerable controversy. A coalition of large, independent brokerages led the charge against the proposal. For now, NAR’s rules have been amended so brokerages would have to opt-in to allowing a franchisor to display its listings.

The controversy was a reflection of a growing debate among brokers about how much control they should attempt to exercise over where their listings are displayed. Many brokers and agents feel it’s best to have their listings distributed as widely as possible.

But others worry that syndicating their listings to large real estate portals like Zillow, Trulia and Realtor.com makes it tough to attract traffic – and leads – to their own websites.

Going Pro

Debate has only intensified in recent months as some of the largest real estate portal companies have acquired syndicators. In addition to Zillow’s acquisition of Postlets, Move Inc. (which operates Realtor.com for NAR) bought leading syndicator ListHub last September.

But Postlets is different from other syndicators in that it allows agents to create listings directly instead of pulling data from an MLS. The company claims to have more than 500,000 users, and it’s been particularly popular for the creation of rental listings because of its ability to syndicate to popular rental listing site Craigslist. It can also be used for the creation of for-sale listings.

Formed in 2005, Postlets was acquired by Zillow in April. Although it always allowed users to freely create listings with its platform, features like the ability to display more photos, add videos, or embed features like school district data and Walk Score into listings required a paid “Postlets Pro” account. Those features will now be free.

“Postlets is well-respected within the industry as a listing platform and resource for individual agents, property managers and landlords to market their listings, for free,” said Whitney Tyner, a spokesperson for Zillow. “Together, Zillow and Postlets are saving agents money and time, by streamlining their marketing and syndication efforts.”

Game Changer?

But that ability to create and distribute listings for free – outside of the traditional Multiple Listing Service (MLS) umbrella – doesn’t seem to have executives at Massachusetts’ largest MLS running scared.

“I think at this point in time, Postlets is a small fish,” said Kathy Condon, CEO of MLS-PIN. “What Zillow decides to do with it, who knows.”

But Mathew Ferrara, a real estate consultant based in Andover, argued that Zillow’s Postlets acquisition is something that has the potential to break the MLS monopoly on listings information. And he said he doesn’t think that would be such a bad thing.

“Postlets and Zillow, I think they’re doing something people don’t recognize,” Ferrara said. “They’re identifying in the marketplace that there’s a slice of agents that want to put out quality information, and they’re enabling them to do it for free. They’re laughing at everybody who’s paying big bucks to jam their stuff into a system.”

On the other hand, many brokers believe that the requirements of MLS membership are what’s keeping MLS listing info the gold standard – for now. In order to make sure they’re entitled to their co-broker fee, most MLSs require brokers to include all listings in the system, and to keep them updated when the status of the listing changes.

Without such structure, it’s up to often harried and overworked agents themselves to keep their information up to date, and often it’s difficult to get outdated information removed. As a result, agents “end up not liking [managing their own online listings], because [listings] ends up re-syndicated… in other places, and then it’s not kept up to date,” Condon said.