A National MLS?

January 24, 2008

zillow Trulia Roost

Why are so many companies spending so much money to try and develop a National MLS. Think Zillow or Trulia who are both advertising driven, the new bird in the nest, Roost, whose business plan relies on selling listings back to the broker sponsoring the area, Point 2, a website software provider (who I have happily used for my original website for over 5 years) with the ambition but no chance for success at this idea (more at another time) and additional others who may or may not succeed at staying in business. Then there’s the old Realtor.com owned by the National Association of Realtors and operated for profit by Move, Inc.

I don’t get it. Zillow and Trulia suffer from not having all of the listings for any market that real estate consumers are searching. While they both have lots of neat web2.0 features, don’t you really want to see every available property.

Roost is taking a different approach; in exchange for getting the idx feed for a market from a broker, they will indeed have all the listings and will sell the clicks (leads) back to the sponsoring broker. They’re opening in 14 real estate markets and hope to be in 40+ within a year.

Clunky old Realtor.com does have all the listings (except fsbo’s) but despite attempted improvements at being a user friendly site, it is still stuck in 1990’s technology. Never the less, it still has the largest percentage of online real estate search traffic.

So what gives, despite the slowing real estate market nationally, venture capitalists and other investors are spending serious money fund websites that may or may not make money but certainly don’t answer the number one need of the real estate consumer: finding all available homes for sale.

charleston mls search Now let’s talk about searching the Charleston MLS on a website like this using the MLS Gateway. It may not be as “pretty” or have all the nifty features of other sites but listings are updated immediately as they are entered into the MLS. If you want to see homes by price, area or narrow your search in other ways, you can. Save your favorites or request additional information. And you can view every home for sale in the Charleston real estate market listed on the MLS.