Zumper moves as SE Rentals listings fall by half

https://therealdeal.com/2017/07/19/streeteasys-rental-listings-plummet-as-agents-push-back-against-fee/

Are they charging for sales listings?

30 - do you think that there's a better search engine than SE for listings? In my particular case, I am only interested in "for sale" listings in Manhattan...

Charging for rental listings may actually improve the integrity of the rental inventory on Streeteasy. If you have a real exclusive rental listing you will not hesitate to advertise it on SE (similar to what you would have done with the NYT in the distant past) Agents know that SE is still the dominant search engine in NYC. Currently SE is inundated with open listings and teaser listing's which primarily helps the agents/firms that flood the portal with company listings to attract clients.

Better for agents/brokers with real, quality rentals.
Better for consumers in weeding out a lot of noise.

What do you think 30 years?

Keith Burkhardt
www.theburkhardtgroup.com

On the one hand I agree that something needed to be done about the "fake" listings which only existed because they were free/no consequences.

On the other hand, when you get outside of Manhattan, a $3 per day fee can be onerous. If you've got a $2,500 a month listing with a 1 month OP which could end up getting split 4 ways (2 agencies and 1 agent per) who takes the $180 hit out of their $625 end?

Or if you have a brand new 500 unit rental building, are you going to fork over $45,000 a month to list it? (I've already seen more than 1 new rental project in LIC which has started leasing but no units on SE).

As far as I know, REBNY's first counter salvo is to take out full multiple page ads in NY Times and ?NY Post? at a cost of almost $300 per week per listing (as opposed to $3 a day?).

TeamM -
Have you tried the OLR search? I don't know much about what it's like using the public side one. I'm not in love with the broker's side one, but it's better than SE's IMNSHO.

As one example of SE's search which I find maddening is that you can't search for private outdoor space.

https://therealdeal.com/2017/08/01/syndication-starts-on-the-rls-today-but-will-it-make-much-difference/

https://therealdeal.com/2017/08/02/shots-fired-4-top-firms-cut-off-streeteasy-after-rebny-syndication/

Just read that several major brokerages in NYC have opted out of streeteasy and will switch to the syndicated feed of the REBNY.
https://ny.curbed.com/2017/8/3/16086626/streeteasy-nyc-rebny-listings-service

https://therealdeal.com/2017/08/07/paydirt-who-needs-game-of-thrones-when-an-epic-is-playing-out-right-here-in-nyc-resi/?utm_source=internal&utm_medium=popular_widget&utm_campaign=posts_popular

https://ny.curbed.com/2017/8/7/16106674/new-york-rental-market-streeteasy-broker-fee

http://nypost.com/2017/08/07/rebny-will-also-list-on-realtor-com-to-compete-with-streeteasy/

https://www.rebny.com/content/rebny/en/newsroom/in-the-news/2017/REBNY_Signs_Direct_Feed_Agreement_with_Move_Inc_Operator_of_Realtor_com.html

https://therealdeal.com/2017/08/23/halstead-joins-streeteasy-boycott/

I recently listed a luxury rental with Citi Habitat and the agent had to pay to get it to streeteasy as that is where they get virtually all their leads. Eventually, I ended up renting it out through personal referral at a fair price.

Some might say "shots fired":

REBNY using the NY Times as their consumer facing portal (and the NY Times no longer charging brokers for advertising) seems to be a shot across SE's bow in the same way that Microsoft giving away IE was "chocking off Netscape's air supply".

https://ny.curbed.com/2017/9/11/16285226/nyc-real-estate-new-york-times-rebny-partnership

Very interesting, I hear the rollout for free NY Times is Oct 1. Interesting times, they've finally pivoted away from paid listings, which never made sense.

https://therealdeal.com/2017/10/10/paydirt-how-rupert-murdoch-plans-to-trample-zillow/

30, When do you think Streeteasy starts to charge brokers for sales listings?

Don't they already do that effectively by re-routing up to 100% of the buyer leads from some listings to "Premier Agents?"

Why would you suggest that we additionally pay, when all the leads are already getting dis-intermediated? Quite confused.

I think we're going to see some interesting stuff in the coming months. You already have several of the big brokers who are no longer updating SE with their sales listings, and the NY Times carrying the RLS feed could lead to things shifting back to them being the "go to" avenue for consumers to the detriment of SE.

It's actually pretty surprising what's going on in the NYC market. To my understanding, in other regions with a proper MLS where the local Realtor association actually has some power and does something, the Zillow Group accepts their feed and is compliant. For example, in Westchester I'm pretty sure Zillow just accepts the HGMLS feed quietly and agrees to terms ... such as listing agent MUST show up first

Really shocking what's happened in NYC. What an interesting case study for business schools...

Would someone mind giving a summary for someone who doesn't really understand the politics/issues so that I can make sure I'm searching the most comprehensive listing search engine? What search engine is going to give me the most accurate sales listings in Manhattan, and allow me to search on specific criteria?

@TeamM - Charging for rentals on SE appears to be the watershed moment when Zillow's dominance of the NYC market will come to an abrupt end. As I understand it, Zillow got greedy and started stealing more leads from listing agents and charging to syndicate rentals pretty much at the same time. This was like a Pearl Harbor attack on listing agents and brokerages.

If they had been more patient and nuanced, Zillow could have silently kept amassing an even larger user base so that the platform would be indestructible. Instead, Zillow managed to make the brokerage industry so angry that (for once) all the competing brokerages have now joined together to actively divert buyer traffic to other sites like www.realtor.com and www.nytimes.com/section/realestate.

Now StreetEasy's user traffic will begin to fall, making the entire brand less valuable and reducing the amount of ad revenue available from selling leads to agents and selling Google ads on their site. If I were a shareholder of Zillow, I'd probably be asking for new leadership in their NYC division right now!

In any event, as a buyer all this means for me is that I will need to start searching more on NYT and Realtor.com to make sure I don't miss any listings that aren't syndicated to StreetEasy.

Thank you, but those search engines are pretty clunky and don't seem to yield as many results as SE when I run my particular search parameters. Maybe they are better for rentals, or maybe they will become better over time (or SE will become worse if brokers are not feeding into SE).

30, Which are the brokers who are not sending their sales listings to Streeteasy? Thanks.

https://www.inman.com/2017/08/02/some-big-brokerages-body-slam-zillow-in-nyc/

"Brokerages that cut off Zillow Group include Brown Harris Stevens, Town Residential, Compass and Stribling & Associates, StreetEasy confirmed"

30 - that's interesting/strange. When I run searches on SE, I see some listings from some of those brokerages.... Does that mean that SE somehow pulls the listing onto SE in another manner?

although those firms cut their feed, SE still allows the agent to manually enter their listings.

Is the consumer that's only searching for sales on streeteasy missing anything at this point?

Keith
Tbg

" Does that mean that SE somehow pulls the listing onto SE in another manner?"
Remember that SE started by getting ZERO feeds, but by "scraping" broker's websites for listings. I'm sure they could go back to doing so. I know when this new issue started, they were not deleting listings from these brokers, but simply not updating them.

"Is the consumer that's only searching for sales on streeteasy missing anything at this point?"
I am fairly sure the answer is yes since doing searches on OLR and SE yields different results. And I have definitely seen recent listings which appear on OLR but not SE.

"although those firms cut their feed, SE still allows the agent to manually enter their listings."
Yes, because the issue is with the feed. Those firms have stopped send their feed to SE.

public.olr.com has a long way to go. It only has three ownership choices: Condo, Coop and Condop. Need I say more.

Could not find any townhouses in Park Slope.

So the Rebny feed is going to realtor.com, nyts, didn't think the New York Times would be relevant real estate search engine again!

Keith
Tbg

Realtor.com does not have coop as a choice!! It does seems that Rebny can get their act together. Instead of firms paying, brokers will pay Streeteasy for the feed as many firms still have an automated opt-in option for their feed for which listing brokers pay.

Keith, Is there a REBNY platform which most brokers use? If so, why not give public access to that and improve over time?

We use realplus, Large firms brokers have there own proprietary systems and there is OLR. REBNY, as far as I know has know listing system. My understanding is the original feed comes from realplus, I believe they feed the rls. REBNY does not actually have a listing database withe servers etc to the best of my knowledge..

It's a bit confusing, perhaps 30 years can explain....

Keith
tbg

Jeez..typo city! Theirs and no...

What is real plus? Is this an aggregation of all listings and is it open to public?

What is real plus? Is this an aggregation of all listings and is it open to public?

History, Experience, and Services

RealPlus, LLC has been servicing technology solutions to the New York City real estate industry for over a quarter of a century. RealPlus can be credited as the architects behind the current electronic listings exchange the RealPlus eXchange (RPX). As there is no widely accepted MLS in the Manhattan real estate industry, the RealPlus eXchange (RPX) is THE system that transmits up to the minute inventory from one firm to another. This system has grown from 10 firms and 300 listings exchanged daily to close to 500 firms and approximately 10,000 listings exchanged daily in accordance with REBNY's RLS guidelines.

Ha.. So it seems that REBNY has no single usable listing platform and will never be able to create a good one given the nature of the organization and a lack of desire to provide transparency to the consumer. Any third party will want to make money eventually once they become good enough which is what Streeteasy is doing.

building a listing system to satisfy all agent needs plus all Consumer needs, that has multiple collaborative personas so each user is extremely challenging.. just getting arls feed doesn't mean u can just plug in and go. Trust me. 100s of integrity issues Murray be engineered, public data must be aggregated, cleansed, standardized, normalized.. etc..i went through it, and it takes years.. and is very expensive.. and without intricate knowledge of rls and acris Abad both user types, is virtually impossible to build custom for this market.

check urbandigs around Thanksgiving, you will see what i mean!

sorry for typos, on mobile here

I do not think there will be an alternative for Streeteasy for consumers any time soon. Spending 2 minutes of OLR showed that competing products lack the skill or incentive to even have basic functionality (no townhouse selection).

OLR is really geared towards brokers. Their broker interface is decent. The public portal is somewhat of an afterthought. RLS is clearly the leader when it comes to market saturation with brokers, but they charge a lot more than OLR so it's harder for small firms to swallow. Plus they charge extra to customize for each broker and their base offering pretty much has to be customized (or at least it used to), so the start-up numbers can be pretty high to get on board with them.

To be clear OLR and RLS are not the same thing, or replacements. The RLS is data, there is no public interface. OLR is a RLS vendor, third party. Just Google and do some research on the NYC multiple listing service (realize it's not technically a MLS) and you'll see.

Correction: in my last post where I said "RLS" I meant RealPlus.