In the cutthroat world of listing portal market share, it’s rare to see top-level executives at rival firms walking in lockstep.
However, that’s just what industry relations chiefs for Redfin and Zillow did on Tuesday, taking aim at what they described as a mountain of red tape by hundreds of MLSs across the country that has greatly limited what features their nationwide portals can offer to consumers.
The comments from Joe Rath of Redfin and Matt Hendricks of Zillow came at Inman Broker Connect, taking place this week in Las Vegas. Sam DeBord of the Real Estate Standards Organization added his perspective as the CEO of an organization working to simplify how data is used and distributed by MLSs.
“Sometimes older rules look like the old tag on the mattress that said, ‘Do not remove this or go to jail,’” DeBord said. “We don’t sometimes know at a certain point why we’re still following a certain rule — for example, ordering the photos.”
At the core of the listing portals’ complaints is the fact that their data comes through contracts with hundreds of multiple listing services across the nation. Each MLS has unique and carefully crafted rules to protect its data and, in many cases, limit how it is used by third parties like listing portals.
“When we have to deal with 500-plus different feeds that all may have a different set of rules,” Hendricks said, “it makes it tough for me, for Joe, for anybody out there, to tailor that 500 ways over, or 300 ways over.”
Hendricks said that some of the MLS rules — such as requirements that exterior shots of the home be presented first for all listings — are a carryover from the days of paper records. Rules like these often make it impractical to customize the home search process to the preferences of the user, he argued.
Rath said Redfin has a host of news tools it knows it could roll out or existing tools it could improve on with the right nationwide data environment. The data exists, the tools are there, and the permissions are all that is missing.
“In some cases, we’re just trying to cut through the red tape to be able to do it ourselves,” Rath said.
Still, Rath said, the limitations are not a huge factor holding back listing portal traffic and revenue. User activity on listing portals is driven more by overall inventory trends, he said. The limitations placed on MLS data mainly hurt consumers, appraisers and others who might benefit from more universal access to the data, and better tools to make sense of it.
Both said they were looking to leadership from MLSs, real estate brokers and groups like DeBord’s RESO to help chart a path to more universal standards of real estate data.
“Think of it as this is a chance for us to evolve a whole set of rules as opposed to, let’s all lock down more than we already have,” Hendricks said.
