Edgeio, the online classifieds site has acquired Adaptive Real Estate Services, reports VentureBeat:
it has acquired the assets of Adaptive Real Estate Services, a company built over the past several years by father and son team Robert and Peter Meyer — and which has patiently built up relationships with brokers and agents in 70 of the top MLS organizations — and equivalent to about 70 percent of the MLS network nationwide. It has about 1.5 million homes listed for sale in the areas it covers.
What ARES really brings to the table is that it has already done the grueling legwork of bridging all the various IDX feeds from different MLS systems into a unified data stream.
Keith Teare, CEO of Edgeio writes:
As we integrate ARES into the edgeio platform it will be possible for users of edgeio.com, and partners of edgedirect to show these 1.5 million homes in search results.
Edgeio, which recently secured $5 million in Series A funding and counts Techcrunch founder and power-blogger Mike Arrington and RSS godfather Dave Winer among its advisors, seems to trying to pull together a national database of real estate listings to supplement its classified ads. Sound familiar?
This acquisition instantly springboards Edgeio into a position to challenge Trulia.com and Realtor.com (which is vulnerable position, having already lost one MLS feed)
What will be interesting to see is how those MLS relationships hold up when and if Edgeio starts including FSBOs and classified listings alongside the IDX results.
Edgeio, like Trulia, Zillow and others is counting on Realtor advertising to support its business model.
