Move Inc.-owned listing syndicator ListHub will stop supplying listings to Trulia on April 7, giving the second most popular real estate site less than a month to come up with an alternative source for more than a quarter of its listings.
At a hearing today, a San Francisco Superior Court judge lifted a temporary restraining order against ListHub and the two companies reached an agreement to continue to provide a data feed to Trulia until April 7 — the same day a syndication agreement between Zillow and ListHub ends.
Move, a News Corp. subsidiary, operates realtor.com, which is battling to win back consumer traffic that it’s lost to Zillow and Trulia in recent years. ListHub aggregates listing data from more than 560 MLSs.
In a statement, Move said it was “extremely pleased and delighted with the court’s ruling” and had agreed to the new cutoff date “[a]s part of ListHub’s commitment to the industry and homebuyers and sellers.”
As part of the settlement, Trulia agreed to drop the breach of contract lawsuit it filed against Move in February, after ListHub announced it had terminated its syndication agreement with Trulia in the wake of Trulia’s acquisition by Zillow. The agreement was originally set to expire in June 2016.
Trulia, now a wholly owned subsidiary of Zillow Group, filed for a temporary restraining order to keep listings flowing to the site, which the court had granted until today’s hearing.
In a statement today, Zillow Group spokeswoman Katie Curnutte said the company is “working hard to ensure home sellers and their agents can easily continue to market homes on Trulia” and is having “tremendous success” signing contracts with MLSs for direct listing feeds.
“In fact, today we are announcing deals with 18 new MLSs that will send listings directly to both Zillow and Trulia,” she said.
“Trulia already receives a majority of their listings directly from brokers and MLSs, and many others are taking steps to create direct relationships with Trulia if they haven’t already.
“By the time ListHub stops sending listings to Trulia on April 7, we expect a small percentage of Trulia’s overall listing count to be affected.”
In their complaint, attorneys for Trulia said more than 25 percent of the listing data the site receives from ListHub is unique — Trulia is not getting information on those homes from another source. An analyst had pegged that figure at 40 percent.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated.
