UPDATED, Aug. 2, 2022, 11 a.m.: The Real Estate Board of New York has discontinued its listing feed to Realtor.com.
Listings will disappear from the site altogether as of Monday if REBNY was their sole distributor, according to an email from Realtor.com obtained by The Real Deal. The announcement said listings from Corcoran Group, Compass and Douglas Elliman and some smaller firms will continue to appear on the site.
A spokesperson for REBNY said the organization pulled its listings because Realtor.com refused to sign its standard data licensing agreement, which is required for other portals that display RLS listings and “ensures that our members’ data is protected.”
“While it’s unfortunate that Realtor.com declined to sign our data licensing agreement, brokerages participating on the RLS are still able to syndicate their listings through a direct feed to Realtor.com,” the spokesperson said.
The listings site is working with affected brokers and will “continue to display some for-sale properties in the New York City area through other listing feed sources,” communications director Stephanie Singer said in a statement.
The decision to end the syndication comes at a busy time for the listings landscape. REBNY last month announced the launch of Citysnap, its MLS website formed in partnership with CoStar Group.
REBNY began syndicating with Realtor.com in 2017 amid a dispute with StreetEasy, when the Zillow-owned listing site began charging brokers $3 for rental listings and refused to accept REBNY’s RLS listings. The price has since gone up to $6 per listing, though sales listings have always been free.
“We will not be taking a feed from the RLS,” said Susan Daimler, then manager of StreetEasy, “because we would characterize this as a clear move to restrict our efforts to provide consumers with the most robust real estate marketplace in New York City.”
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Shortly after, 10 of the city’s top brokerages pulled their listings from StreetEasy, throwing support behind Realtor.com’s reach for market share. StreetEasy lost half its 32,000 rental listings and a good chunk of its sales listings.
StreetEasy had roughly 12,000 rental listings and 17,000 sales listings, as of Monday, and reports that 80 percent of consumers searching for real estate in New York used the site or other sites owned by Zillow.
But REBNY and the brokerages remain determined to create a StreetEasy alternative. Citysnap, backed by deep-pocketed CoStar Group, a commercial real estate behemoth, represents the most substantial effort to date. Brokers can list for free, and the platform promises to pass leads on to listing agents, rather than sell them to other brokers, like StreetEasy does.