Moving to capitalize on its new freedom to publish listings from non-Realtor affiliated sources, realtor.com is now getting listing data from The Corcoran Group, and is in discussions to license data from other New York City brokerages and the Real Estate Board of New York (REBNY).
Up until amendments to the realtor.com operating agreement were approved by the National Association of Realtors in July, the portal could not license data from non-Realtor-affiliated brokers and multiple listings services.
“New York City was a bit of a hole for us,” said Curt Beardsley, vice president of product marketing at realtor.com operator Move Inc.
The Corcoran Group is the first non-NAR-affiliated brokerage to send its existing-home listings to realtor.com since Move and NAR signed off on amendments to the 1996 operating agreement. The amendments were motivated in part by the desire to stem realtor.com’s loss of Internet market share to competitors like Zillow and Trulia.
The Corcoran Group had previously sent data feeds to Zillow, Trulia, The New York Times and the New York City-focused site StreetEasy, which Zillow acquired in August, said Matthew Shadbolt, director of interactive product and marketing at The Corcoran Group.
Shadbolt said some of The Corcoran Group’s listings were already appearing on realtor.com, funneled to the site by Realtor-affiliated MLSs that the brokerage belongs to. The new feed to realtor.com will bring additional listings, predominantly from the New York City boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn, to the portal.
“This agreement (between realtor.com and Corcoran Group) delivers on the promise of the historic decision made by the National Association of Realtors this summer to empower realtor.com as the most timely, accurate and comprehensive source of real estate information anywhere,” said Errol Samuelson, president of realtor.com, in a statement.
The amendments to the realtor.com operating agreement will also allow the website to shore up holes in its listings database in parts of Seattle and Hampton, Va. In those markets, realtor.com has feeds, but some data from non-Realtor-affiliated sources has been filtered out, Beardsley said.
In most parts of the country, including California, Florida and Colorado, realtor.com has been able to receive data from non-NAR-affiliated brokers because the MLSs that fed the portal data in those areas didn’t differentiate among their sources. Realtor.com takes data from brokers only if an MLS requires it to do so.
Realtor.com gets direct feeds from more than 800 MLSs across the U.S., representing approximately 98 percent of the MLS-listed homes for sale. Beardsley says the portal is looking to add to that total, now that it can sign licensing agreements with the handful of non-Realtor-affiliated MLSs from which it was previously barred from doing business with.
The amendments to the realtor.com operating agreement also allow the site to display rentals, new homes and new-home communities not represented by Realtors.
In August, realtor.com announced that it was adding 44,000 new-home plans from Builders Digital Experience, a joint venture between Move and Builder Homesite Inc.
