TRD partners with REBNY on property listings portal

In this city, exclusive real estate listings are the next best thing to money in the bank. And The Real Deal is offering up a new listings portal as a service to help readers do deals and cash in.

The biggest real estate news outlet in the city — and nationwide — has partnered with the Real Estate Board of New York, the city’s largest real estate trade group, to unveil a free property listings platform for brokers.

The property portal, which will debut on TheRealDeal.com in December, will feature more than 17,000 listings from 12,000 brokers and agents who are members of REBNY. More than 300 brokerage firms will be represented on the site, which will feature the most comprehensive listings feed for New York City real estate.

“Our mission is to provide unvarnished transparency to the real estate industry through our news coverage, and also to place the greatest amount of information at the fingertips of real estate professionals and readers, who are ultimately end-users too,” said TRD publisher Amir Korangy. “Providing listings is a natural evolution of The Real Deal’s platform, and we are gearing this to the needs of readers, who are all interested in real estate, in order to best service them.”

The partnership came about as a result of recent changes in the industry, with many agents now being charged for posting their properties.

REBNY launched a free syndication service for its listings in August, and has established listings feeds to other outlets including the New York Times, Homes.com, Realtor.com, Apartments.com, and now, TRD.

“REBNY is pleased to join forces with The Real Deal to deliver accurate listings data,” said REBNY president John Banks. “We look forward to working with Amir Korangy and his team to bring RLS listings data to The Real Deal’s broad and influential audience.”

TheRealDeal.com has more than 2.5 million visits a month and over 1 million visitors, the largest real estate-focused audience in the country. The site also topped Quantcast’s list of the sites with the wealthiest online audience, beating out the likes of CNBC, Crunchbase, and MarketWatch.

The portal is being designed by Jordan Preston, a founder of LavaMap.com, a map-based property website.

Readers will be able to see all listings on interactive maps, track open houses, create “hot lists” that allow them to keep tabs on the best deals, and get alerts sent to them for properties that match their preferences. Agents’ contact information will be readily visible on each listing page.

Korangy said that TRD is focused on building out more tools for brokers to use, to complement its award-winning breaking news, rankings and longform stories. The site launched a research division, TRData, earlier this year. It includes more than 100,000 pages of research, ranging from New York development pipeline and transaction databases to bios of key real estate players and companies.

“In addition to providing news coverage that doesn’t curry favor and provides a level playing field for real estate, we want to be the one-stop shop for all the information our readers need,” Korangy said.

(Editor’s note: The Real Deal will continue to cover REBNY-related news and happenings, as per usual.)