The Multiple Listing Service of Greater Cincinnati is getting a facelift from a tech startup partially owned by another MLS.
CincyMLS, which boasts more than 8,000 agent and broker subscribers in southwestern Ohio and southeastern Indiana, has signed a partnership deal with Perchwell, a real estate data visualization, search, and collaboration platform for agents and their clients, the companies announced Tuesday.
Founded in 2015, Perchwell is both a “back end” (database) MLS product and a “front end” MLS product and will be providing both to CincyMLS, Perchwell’s founder and CEO Brendan Fairbanks told Inman exclusively. “Front end” refers to what agents see when they log on. Perchwell marries listing information to public and private data sets that provide context to those listings and provides workflow and productivity tools such as custom analytics, reports, listing presentations, client collaboration and contact management.
CincyMLS currently uses the Rapattoni MLS platform and once the transition is complete — either late in Q4 2022 or in Q1 2023 — subscribers will no longer have access to it, according to Fairbanks.
Brendan Fairbanks
“Perchwell aggregates and structures myriad data sets that include not only listings, but also transactional, geospatial, zoning and other data sets which, without Perchwell, agents typically must source separately,” he said.
“Perchwell brings all those data together in an end-to-end platform that streamlines daily workflows and empowers agents to develop market insights and analytics tailored to each client’s unique situation.”
Perchwell’s platform also offers interoperability with other tech products that “will make it easier for other products to plug into Cincy’s ecosystem, which will encourage the development and launch of additional products that benefit Cincy’s membership,” he added.
In a statement, Sharon Chard, COO of CincyMLS, noted the rapid evolution of the real estate industry.
“We need to ensure that our members are equipped with the technology and tools they need to succeed by providing systems that can effectively progress at the same pace,” she said.
Sharon Chard
“We are always on the lookout for new technology products, but we rarely find a company taking a new approach to solving large, longstanding problems. Perchwell is doing exactly that, and we are confident it is the right technology foundation for our organization going forward.”
Until now, Perchwell has only debuted in New York City, where the company says it’s the technology platform of choice among top local and national brokerages, including Sotheby’s International Realty, Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices and Serhant.
Perchwell also operates the Real Estate Board of New York (REBNY)’s Residential Listing Service, the Big Apple’s de facto MLS.
In December 2021, Perchwell announced it had raised $15 million in a Series A round lead by Founders Fund with California Regional MLS, the largest MLS in the country, also participating. CRMLS’s investment in Perchwell is the first for a venture fund the MLS launched late last year.
At the time, Perchwell said it planned to use its new funding to expand its product and engineering teams and scale its platform nationally, with CRMLS among the first markets the company expands to sometime this year. Perchwell is planning its CRMLS launch before expanding to CincyMLS, according to Fairbanks.
Since then, Perchwell has nearly tripled the size of its team to prepare for expansion, according to the company.
“We are building Perchwell to empower agents with the next generation of tools to serve their clients and grow their businesses to new heights,” Fairbanks said in a statement.
“We initially concentrated on New York, but we now have significant demand from agents across the country. We are focused on finding like-minded partners for our next phase of growth and it was clear from our first meeting with CincyMLS that there was a natural fit.”
