Rupert Murdoch — well, more likely his lieutenant, new Move CEO Ryan O’Hara — has made his first sally in the war against Zillow/Trulia: In April, the listing feed Zillow receives from Move subsidiary ListHub will be cut off, depriving the site of hundreds of thousands of listings.
Not at all coincidentally, Zillow has just announced a brand-new broker dashboard, designed to make it simple as pie for any broker to send their listings to Zillow directly, with all kinds of customization options and a built-in opt-out button, to reassure any lingering suspicions on the part of the brokers.
Squinting a bit and looking at these two things combined, my question is: Will Murdoch’s hardball tactics finally bring about brokers’ darkest — or at least oft-repeated — fear; that Zillow will become a de facto national MLS?
The crux of the matter is simply this: Is the Zillow brand well-established enough in consumer’s minds as the source for real estate info that not being on Zillow hurts brokers more than not having their listings hurts Zillow?
In cutting off Zillow, Murdoch’s making the move some have been begging the industry to make, to “take back control” over the data and make sure that if consumers want to see what they have to sell, they have to come to sources Realtors ultimately control — either brokers’ and agents’ own sites, or Realtor.com. If consumers come to realize that they’re not seeing everything there is to see when they visit Zillow, then they will abandon it, is the thinking.
But will they? The timeliness and accuracy of Zillow’s listings — or rather the lack thereof — has been agents’ No. 1 complaint about the site for years, years in which traffic to the portal has exploded and it’s definitively taken the top spot as the most trafficked real estate website. Further, it’s not at all clear how apparent any shift in the amount of MLS listing available on the site will be to consumers — between FSBOs, “make me move” listings and “pre-foreclosure” properties, the sheer number of results a listing search turns up in a given area might not be drastically different. It may well be that consumers aren’t sticking to a site because of quantity — how many listings there are to look at — so much as quality — how easy it is to search, the quality of the supplementary info, pretty pictures. On the later front, Zillow may still have what it takes to not only compete but succeed.
But perhaps more importantly, it’s not as if Zillow didn’t seen this coming: For the past two years it has been pushing hard to establish direct feeds with large brokers, and it has had some success. Last spring, when a California MLS got into a tiff with the portal and decided to delay off their feed, a Zillow source told blogger Rob Hanh that 93 percent of the listings from that MLS’s territory were still making it onto the site, provided directly by the brokers themselves.
Of course, the feed from one tiny MLS and all listings being syndicated by ListHub, the dominant syndication provider in the industry, are very different matters. But the CLAW affair does illustrate what happens in one instance when an MLS tried to detach itself from the portal: its individual members tumbled over themselves trying to reach the mothership directly. If the ListHub feed goes, could we see the same phenomena again, on a nationwide scale? Zillow’s new dashboard is clearly designed to facilitate this. And if history does repeat itself… how many direct broker feeds will it take for Zillow to become a de facto national MLS? If half of all U.S. listings are being fed directly to Zillow, does that count? And if, in a few years, 75 percent of brokers are feeding all their listings straight to Zillow and getting most of their online leads from Zillow… won’t they start to look at the expense and headaches involved in dealing with their local MLS with a pretty skeptical eye? The proliferation of tiny MLSs, such that some regional brokers must belong to dozens to get full coverage for the areas in which they operate, is but one of the litany of complaints about MLSs raised by the Realty Alliance in its shot across the bow of the industry a few years ago.
In fact, will it take five years? With many large national brokerage already establishing direct feeds to Zillow, how close is the industry already to that 50-percent-plus threshold? And with rumors of a broker-owned, broker-only listings platform (Project Upstream) under development, could there already be a critical mass of brokers out there who think dealing with their local MLS is more trouble than it’s worth? Even NAR, in its recent policy changes, seems to be trying to gently push MLSs into more consolidation — declaring that they must provide more data in a more timely fashion.
