REAL ESTATE
In April, Homestore.com heard a loud knock on the door: It was the DOJ's Antitrust Division. The house-hunting portal operates an array of sites, among them Realtor.com, official site of the National Association of Realtors. What piqued the DOJ's curiosity, it seems, was Homestore.com's effort to keep the multiple listing services (MLS) - for-sale listings compiled by the NAR's 1,600 local Boards of Realtors - to itself.
Since the 1960s, MLS data has been closely guarded by realtors. "The old-school way of real estate was we had the listings," says Ray Burke, an agent with RE/MAX in Tallahassee, Florida, and former director of the Tallahassee Board of Realtors. "Consumers needed to come to us to get that information, so we had control of the market."
But as more house hunters have turned to the Web - up from 2 percent in 1995 to 37 percent in 1999, according to the NAR - local boards have been licensing their MLS listings to independent Web sites like Homeseekers.com. Homeseekers generates leads for agents via customizable pages and tracking tools, and also lets prospective buyers search listings according to a variety of criteria. The site was the first indie to obtain the right to distribute local MLS data in 1995, and now most of its 850,000 listings are based on MLS data.
Homestore.com, meanwhile, has aggregated 1.3 million listings on Realtor.com, offering its stock to local boards in return for exclusivity. Corralling all listings into one NAR-sanctioned site, says chair and CEO Stuart Wolff, ensures quality and simplifies the lives of agents and buyers.
But Homestore.com's lock on the listings increasingly doesn't sit well with agents. "We're paid to market property, and we need to list it in as many places as possible," Burke argues. Agrowing number of local Boards of Realtors are breaking ranks, making their listings freely available. Even when a board signs exclusively with Realtor.com, more and more disgruntled agents are taking their own listings to competing sites.
NAR president Dennis Cronk grasps the trend. Agents must evolve, he says, from keepers of sacred data to guides through the labyrinth of buying a home. What remains to be seen is how the NAR will adjust to the newly networked maze.
- Rick Overton (riverton@mindspring.com)
Homestore.com: www.homestore.com.
Homeseekers.com: www.homeseekers.com.
NEW MONEY
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