Members of one of the nation’s largest multiple listing services, Metropolitan Regional Information Systems, will no longer need to worry that they won’t be able to send their listings directly to Zillow (Z) once Zillow’s listing agreement with Listhub ends on April 7.
MRIS announced that it will soon join the Zillow Partnership Program, which will allow the 45,000 real estate professionals that are MRIS members to send their listings directly to Zillow using Zillow’s new Data Dashboard.
MRIS’ membership spans real estate professionals in Maryland, Virginia, Washington, D.C. and parts of Pennsylvania, Delaware and West Virginia and its agents facilitate over $125 million a day in real estate transactions.
Curt Beardsley, Zillow’s vice president of industry development, said that MRIS’ market is “very hot” right now and ensuring a direct connection with MRIS members is very important to Zillow.
“Inventory is incredibly tight in this region so ensuring listings are up-to-date is a top priority for us,” Beardsley said. “Having high quality listing data helps guarantee consumers have the best experience possible. A new direct data feed helps us not only maintain that great consumer experience, but allows for us to better serve the customers of MRIS."
Zillow CEO Spencer Rascoff said that the company is “very excited” to create a direct relationship between MRIS and Zillow.
“This partnership means MRIS's huge inventory of for-sale listings will appear accurately and quickly to the millions of home shoppers using Zillow, and that the brokers and agents who are part of MRIS will have total control over the content of their listings,” Rascoff said.
Through this partnership, MRIS brokers will be able to have their listings sent directly to Zillow, so that their current listings on Zillow.com and Zillow’s portfolio of brands and products on mobile and the Web are always up-to-date.
Zillow is launching its Data Dashboard to replace Listhub. Zillow announced the ending of its four-year listing agreement with Listhub via a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, inwhich said it is ending its four-year listing agreement with Threewide Corporation. Threewide operates Listhub. Threewide is owned by Move, Inc., which operates Realtor.com for the National Association of Realtors. And Move is now owned by News Corp (NWS).
“There is no dispute between the parties with respect to the agreement, and Zillow will not incur any early termination penalties as a result of the agreement’s expiration,” Zillow said in its SEC filing.
But a in a statement provided to HousingWire, Move said that it hoped to continue the listing agreement.
“ListHub has been negotiating in good faith a new listing distribution and reporting agreement with Zillow on terms that reflect the best interests of the brokerage industry,” Move said in a statement. “As communicated in public announcements, Zillow decided to end those negotiations and announced the launch of their own platform. Zillow chose their own route for their business model and interests.”
A Zillow spokesperson told HousingWire that it expects a “few hundred thousand” out of the 3.6 million listings currently on Zillow to be affected when the Listhub agreement ends, but said that Zillow is attempting to contact all of the potentially impacted MLSs to secure listing agreements to avoid any listings disappearing from Zillow.
And now with MRIS on board, Zillow has the opportunity to boost its listing data with the more than 50,000 residential listings and 8,800 rental listings that belong to MRIS members.
"Our brokers retain complete control over their listings and the opportunity to market them as they see fit," said David Charron, president and CEO of MRIS. "Zillow offers reporting data and other services we believe will help our members be more successful, including highlighting the listing agent on every listing and a dedicated customer service team."
