Brooklyn’s biggest Multiple Listing Service has partnered with StreetEasy to place some 2,500 of its listings on the site, aiming for a new era of transparency for real estate in the borough. All member listings from the Brooklyn New York MLS are now visible for the first time on StreetEasy, according to Dawn Doherty, the vice president of strategic development at the real estate listings Web site.
That means information on price changes and the number of days on the market — data that StreetEasy compiles for each listing on its site — will be available to consumers for the first time, she said.
In the past, listings information for the Brooklyn New York MLS, including listings’ specific addresses, was available only to the group’s members.
With the addition of the new data, StreetEasy now has nearly 8,750 total Brooklyn listings — 7,000 sales listings and 1,750 rental listings — versus a total of 6,250 previously, an increase of 2,500 listings.
When StreetEasy was first launched in 2006, it operated by “scraping” the Web for real estate listings and posting them, allowing users to access and search nearly all of the city’s listings for free. Now, however, most of StreetEasy’s listings are provided directly to the site by industry feeds and by brokers themselves, though some are still found by scanning the Web.
Until now, Doherty said, the site’s accumulation of Brooklyn listings has been hampered by the domination of small, independent real estate brokerages in the borough, making it harder to ensure that all of the listings are represented on the site. In Manhattan, by contrast, large firms like Prudential Douglas Elliman and the Corcoran Group have a large majority of the listings.
Brooklyn previously had five MLS systems, but they have merged over the years into two: the Brooklyn New York MLS and the smaller Brooklyn MLS, said Gerard Longo, the president of Brooklyn brokerage Madison Estates and Properties and president of the BNYMLS.
In the coming months, the Brooklyn MLS also will be absorbed into the BNYMLS, which is the largest MLS in the borough, with members from more than 200 companies, he said.
This story originally ran on www.therealdeal.com