I’ve been mulling over this interesting article on Inman about the results of the Edina Realty experiment. The Minnesota brokerage caused quite a splash last year when it pulled its listings from Zillow and Trulia, a move that seemed to get a lot of approval from agents and brokers — but few imitators. Inman says that the brokerage seems to think it was a rousing success, reporting that visitors to their site are up significantly and so are their sales, more so than the average increase for brokerages in their MLS in what has been a year of widespread housing recovery. (Though local competitors and web traffic monitors say different.)
The question is, if Edina can make a go of it, can other brokerages? I remember having a conversation with someone earlier in the year — maybe Brian Larson or Victor Lund? — who pointed out to me that the bottom-line impact of withdrawing from the portals might be a lot different for the average independent brokerage and for a strong regional player like Edina, which has about 20 percent of the listings in its market area. It seems that in Edina’s case that number one market share meant enough buyers knew their brand and remembered to check out their site as well as the portals when shopping for homes. Many independent brokers aren’t so lucky.
Many, but not all. If Edina’s withdrawal from the portals is such a success, other brokers may be willing to make the leap. (Rochester’s Nothnagle Realtors recently did.) It’s less clear that their move benefits sellers and buyers. If I were a canny agent who competes with Edina, I’d be doing some quick calculations to see if their experiment had any statistical impact on the ratio of their listing/sales price — covering 20 percent of the market might be enough to get a sizable chunk of potential buyers to stop by your site, but all of them? If Edina listings aren’t getting scoped out by the whole buyer pool, that may not be the best thing for sellers, since there will be fewer offers and less chance of competitive bidding driving up final sales price.
It also put me in mind of this piece on the future of the MLS on the tech industry blog Read Write Web. (h/t 1000 Watt.) That is, the total lack of future. Unlike many articles about the real estate industry from tech blogs, Foster is pretty well versed in how MLSs actually work. But overall the piece is right in line with a lot of outsider perspectives on the industry — namely that anyone trying to control information flow in the age of the internet is playing a mug’s game, and that if Zillow and Trulia have the eyeballs of consumers, resistance on the part of the industry is futile.
But I don’t think there’s a broker out there who considers a 23 percent boost to his bottom line “futile.” If the Edina experiment helps spark a broker’s revolt, would brokers find themselves pitted against their own customers? Is there any way to finesse explaining to customers that you’re deliberately making their real estate search process more cumbersome and time consuming (by forcing them to go to several different sites to see all local listings) in order to concentrate market power back in the hands of brokers?
Yelling about inaccuracies on the portals’ listings doesn’t seem to have worked yet….
