The city’s two largest residential brokerages, the Corcoran Group and Prudential Douglas Elliman, said last month that they do not intend to participate in the public listings portal that the Real Estate Board of New York is developing.
The blow to plans for the portal came following a prior — and possibly pre-emptive — announcement that REBNY would not require its members to provide property listings for the Web site, which will provide those listings to the public.
Corcoran and Elliman executives cited the portal’s proposed joining costs — which REBNY recently announced would be higher for larger brokerages than for smaller ones — and the fact that both have developed their own comprehensive Web sites as the reason they decided against participating. Corcoran’s sister companies Citi Habitats and the Corcoran Sunshine Marketing Group also won’t be part of the portal, the New York Times reported.
Corcoran, Elliman and Citi Habitats represent the lion’s share of the Manhattan listings market, accounting for 63 percent of listings.
Representatives for Corcoran and Elliman declined to expand on the reasons for the firms’ decisions as of press time.
Last month REBNY also announced that it had selected Trulia.com to construct the online listings search engine, a sign that development is moving forward, even if the biggest firms don’t join up.
The decision to make participation in the site voluntary reversed REBNY’s initial decision to require participation in the portal, meant to collect property listings from all its member firms onto a single public Web site.
The organization currently operates a database of property listings that all members can access, but it is not available to home buyers and sellers. The public portal would represent most of the listings’ details, minus some competitive information that is currently only shared among REBNY members.
Trulia was chosen to build the public portal from a shortlist of six finalists.
A broker who spoke on condition of anonymity said REBNY would pay Trulia $50,000 for the portal development, with a $20,000 annual fee for upkeep and maintenance. Neither REBNY nor Trulia confirmed those figures.
The portal is supposed to closely resemble the current Trulia site, which serves major cities in the United States. As an Internet “spider,” Trulia collects real estate listings from other Web sites, typically brokerages, consolidating listings in one location — much like the service it will provide for REBNY.
The current Trulia site will exist side by side with the REBNY-branded site, said Trulia co-founder Sami Inkinen, who started the company three years ago in California before branching out to New York.
Inkinen reassured REBNY brokers at a March 23 information session that the portal “will not capture or generate leads,” but will follow the current Trulia model of linking to a broker’s site directly. And once there, if the consumer chooses to, they can ask for more information directly from the broker’s site.
“We spent a great deal of time visualizing information in a way that makes sense in the eyes of the consumer,” said Inkinen. “The REBNY site will follow the same principles — it will hide the complexity and make it very visual and easy and fast for the consumers.”
Brokers also noted that they were asked at the meeting if they realized that the new portal would save them in advertising costs. Millions of dollars are spent each year on real estate ads in local publications, the most prominent of which is the New York Times. Portal proponents say the site is a way brokers can cut ad spending.
The planned Web portal has been the subject of intense scrutiny among REBNY members, with some smaller firms claiming that the portal would give larger firms an unfair boost, since listings from bigger brokerages would greatly outnumber those from smaller brokerages.
But behemoth Corcoran and Elliman’s decision not to join the portal showed the biggest firms have issues with it as well.
Fees for larger firms were recently increased, but would still appear to be a drop in the bucket for Elliman and Corcoran, which handle billions of dollars in sales each year, indicating there are other issues at play.
Large firms with more than 100 brokers will pay a $12,000 fee to join the portal, up from the previously stated $7,000. Firms with fewer than 100 agents need to pay $2,500 to join the portal instead of an earlier figure of $3,500, according to a REBNY member with close knowledge of the issue
Trulia’s Inkinen held out the possibility that some opponents of the portal would join up later, saying there was no firm deadline to join. “There’s no such thing as black and white,” he said. “You might join today. I might join tomorrow.”