A consortium of brokers and multiple listing services, including Massachusetts’s largest MLS, MLS PIN, have come together to help launch a national public portal for real estate listings.
The portal will be modeled on successful public-facing MLS sites like those of the Houston Association of Realtors (HAR.com) or MRIS’s offering in the mid-Atlantic states, said Victor Lund, partner at California-based real estate consultancy WAV Group and the public spokesman for the project.
Such public-facing MLS websites have proved controversial in the past – a rule change by the National Association of Realtors (NAR) in 2013 that allowed NAR-affiliated MLSs to use dues money to help build such sites provoked a public rebuke from a consortium of large brokers. Many brokers feel that public-facing MLS sites compete directly with their own websites and make it more difficult for them to attract consumer eyeballs – a bitter pill to swallow when it’s their own dues that help subsidize them. That opinion, however, has not been universal: broker-owned MLS PIN quietly launched its own public-facing site this fall.
And, said Lund, “when you talk about a national MLS website, [brokers’] opinions change. … There are some principles that brokers believe in – you don’t advertise on my listing. If a consumer inquires about my listing, that inquiry should go to me.”
Third-party listing portals like Zillow and Trulia allow several agents to advertise their services on a single listing. The public broker portal, in contrast, would adhere to a set of “Fair Display Guidelines” promulgated by The Realty Alliance, a consortium of large brokers. The guidelines call for any leads generated by a listing to go to the listing agent, as well as prominently branding the listing with the logo and trademark of the listing firm, helping ensure that the seller’s agent becomes the main point of contact for interested buyers.
That promise – that any leads generated by their listing will go directly to brokers – has been enough to garner the interest of dozens of large brokers across the country, including Crye-Leike, Edina Realty, William Pitt Sotheby’s and the Leading RE consortium, as well as the support of several of the nation’s largest MLSs, including Maryland-based Metropolitan Regional Information Systems Inc. (MRIS) and Midwest Real Estate Data (MRED). Connecticut MLS is also participating.
Together, the group has donated $250,000 over the past 10 weeks to begin the formal process of launching the site, starting with registering as a nonprofit corporation, forming a board, hiring lawyers and generating a formal request for proposals outlining the plan for the site’s development.
The exact path the group will take to create the site is still an active discussion. Possibilities include building the site from scratch or acquiring an existing site and making use of its technology and branding, Lund said. However, the group estimates that the minimum amount of funds required to launch a viable site will be $15 million. The launch funds will be provided by the brokers and MLSs sponsoring the project. When the site is up, ongoing funding will be drawn from the dues of participating MLSs, estimated at $1 to $3 per MLS subscriber per month.
Banker & Tradesman was unable to reach Kathy Condon, CEO of MLS PIN, for comment on the MLS’s decision to participate in the project before press time. Melissa Lindberg, spokeswoman for MLS PIN, did offer a statement on the project, saying “At this time, MLS PIN’s involvement with the broker public portal is to ensure that we are provided with insight on its future direction, to represent MLS PIN’s best interests, and to take part in decision-making as the project develops.”

Competition Coming Up Behind
The idea of the portal has already attracted some criticism from industry watchers. The top-heavy nature of the enterprise and complicated governance structure necessary to avoid piquing the interest of federal anti-trust regulators could hobble the group’s ability to compete with the more nimble third party portals like Zillow, Trulia and Realtor.com, recently acquired by Rupert Murdoch, real estate blogger and consultant Rob Hanh wrote.
Meanwhile, other broker initiatives which could drain support from the portal are already underway. A consortium of brokers affiliated with The Realty Alliance is at work on a rumored “Project Upstream” that would allow brokers to share listings with each other before putting them in the MLS. The nation’s largest brokerage, Realogy-owned NRT, launched its own national portal site in February, Homesforsale.com, also aiming at providing more leads directly to its agents. NRT owns hundreds of Sotheby’s International and Coldwell Banker branches, including Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage New England, which operates 80 branches in Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire and Rhode Island.
Others have questioned whether a broker public portal will be able to effectively compete with the third-party portals. Regarding the preliminary plans for the portal, which call for a $15 million initial investment, “just sounds like rebuilding Zillow, 10 years too late,” wrote Drew Meyers, a real estate technology consultant and founder of the GeekEstate blog. Zillow, the dominant listings portal in terms of web visits, attracted 48 percent of real-estate related search traffic in June 2014, according to a survey by web analytics firm ComScore. In 2014, Zillow spent $167 million on sales and marketing to achieve that figure, up over $37 million from what it spent in 2013, according to the company’s annual report.
Numbers like that don’t worry Lund, however. The broker public portal will not rely on traffic from Google searches to draw people to its site. Instead, it will take advantage of the 200 million-plus emails and alerts already being sent by MLS services to interested buyers to help drive traffic to the site. While much of Zillow’s traffic is generated by general-interest queries often from buyers just starting to think about purchasing a house, buyers who are already working with an agent or who have signed up to received emails from an MLS public site are often much further along in the home-buying process, making them more valuable prospects.
“Obviously, [third-party portals] attract a lot of advertising dollars, so they must be offering something of value. But I don’t know that they’ve put a moat around the industry the way that, say, the newspapers did,” such that real estate agents feel compelled to advertise on the sites regardless of how effective they believe the ads to be, said Lund. “But the first thing anybody who’s interested in selling a home today should ask their agent is ‘is it in the MLS?’ Because everybody who’s searching for a home for a buyer has set up that search in the MLS.” By tapping into such committed buyers, he believes the broker public portal can succeed.