The Times They Are A’Changin’
In New York residential real estate, we live in interesting times. As technology changes many of the ways we do business, it also creates opportunities for us to improve the way we do what we have always done. So it is that this week, after a year of consolidated effort, The Real Estate Board of New York’s listing system, known as RLS, will begin to aggregate listings into a consolidated feed which, going forward will be the only way many of us provide information to third party marketing websites and each other. As of today, this feed will connect to over 200 websites serving tens of millions of consumers. And more are joining every day.
Although we are the largest local market in the country by dollar volume, the industry has enjoyed few technology options. The data about thousands of different apartment buildings and the arcane rules of hundreds of co-ops combined to make the barrier to entry for outside vendors prohibitively high. When, a few years ago, we standardized our listing formats, that opened the door for new technology to begin to come in. Now, as more tech entrepreneurs see the potential marketplace for both agent facing and consumer facing systems, the trickle is turning into a flood. The RLS consolidated feed opens those gates still further by providing one step shopping for high quality data.
As the program gets underway, the benefit to consumers will be immediately apparent. No site in New York today offers listing information which is both accurate and timely. Consumer facing websites sag under the weight of incorrect information and stale or outdated listings. The staff at REBNY has spent recent months purging OVER 10,000 LISTINGS from the general database; although sold or taken off the market, these listings had lingered within the system, some of them for years. There will be no lag time between when listings appear on one third party site and another. Every signatory to the RLS agreement will have to abide by business rules governing both timeliness and presentation.
In the short term this will cause some disruption in the way things are done. The RLS feed is an opt-in feed, which means that every firm which wishes to participate must decide to do so. Warburg Realty has committed to opting in, as have The Corcoran Group, Brown Harris Stevens, Halstead, Town Residential, Compass, Sothebys International Realty, and Stribling & Associates, among many others. And the consumer facing websites which carry our information must agree to accept the RLS feed, and to abide by the business rules we have laid out for their participation.
To date, a few consumer facing sites have publicly stated that they will not accept a consolidated feed. Included in this group is StreetEasy, whose President Susan Daimler said in a recent statement, ”We have had this conversation with REBNY and we clearly stated at that time that we will not be taking a feed from the RLS.” What that means, unless things change, is that in the coming weeks, the listings of the many firms which have opted in to the RLS consolidated feed may start to go stale on those websites which have not agreed to accept the RLS feed. Furthermore, the new listings which those companies place on the market will not appear at all on sites which have declined to receive the feed.
All listings will appear on those sites which accept the feed, including several exciting new ones which are taking advantage of this moment to bring cutting edge consumer facing products into our marketplace. And gradually, as has happened before in our marketplace, competition will reshape the picture of how, and by whom, timely market information is exchanged between the New York real estate community and its buyers and sellers.