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WATCH: How REBNY’s RLS became the “mother of all initiatives”
John Banks says trade organization had to shift gears from politics to tech
The Real Estate Board of New York’s residential listings service (RLS) was in the cards for years — but it wasn’t until StreetEasy’s push to monetize listings that the trade organization really hit the accelerator on the highly-anticipated syndicated feed.
“We were planning a 2017 year rollout,” REBNY president John Banks told The Real Deal’s Hiten Samtani during a recent interview. “Because of Zillow and StreetEasy, we made a greater effort to get it done sooner rather than later.”
Outrage and subsequent boycotts of the listings platform forced the board to shift gears from trade organization to tech company.
“REBNY has not been traditionally a tech-savvy organization,” Banks said. “But reality has dictated we’ve become one, and we’ve become much more aggressive in how we approach our technology than we have been in the past.”
To see Banks talk more about the RLS and the StreetEasy fallout, watch the video above. See the full interview here.
Produced by Jhila Farzaneh and Kerry Barger. Interview conducted by Hiten Samtani