prior versions of listings

I don’t think text revisions of a particular listing are stored anywhere on real estate websites.

Thanks, 300. I know there's archive.org / Wayback Machine, but that doesn't capture all updates.

Another related question that you or others might know. What is the website the NYC brokerage is rallying around as a competitor to StreetEasy? Is it cityrealty.com?

Are you talking about CitySnap?

There is OLR.com and believe multiple brokerages may be doing some half assed attempt to build a new website. I have seen that Compass may be the only broker whose listings sometimes don’t show up on Streeteasy.

And Urbandigs doesn’t capture all Streeteasy listing.

Thanks, I was thinking of CitySnap I think.

CitySnap is quite nicely functional from my quick playing, on a computer at least.

But doesn’t have most of the listings.

Look at 1 Irving Place as an example.

Look at 1 Irving Place as an example.

Part of this is a few brokers comments on CitySnap
https://www.urbandigs.com/forum/index.php?threads/brokers-rebny-zillow-streeteasy-at-odds-in-2022.149/page-3

Perhaps I'm using it incorrectly but it seems to me recently the search functionality of StreetEasy was greatly diminished as I can no longer find the Advanced Search.

Citysnap will need to figure out why the buyers and renters would go there instead of Streeteasy.

Streeteasy does not charge a listing fee eliminating broker's incentive to not list on Streeteasy.

For renters, large rental landlords can decide not to pay Streeteasy as they can list for free but more realistically they will list a few on Streeteasy and say many other listings available on their own website.

30, Do the dumb search first and refine the results. All the old functionality is there. I think they want people to move to the app.

Thank you. Where do you use to search descriptions for keywords? I couldn't find that.

Under "More"

We seem to be back in a fragmented listing world. Using your 1 Irving example, note the SE listings for rent (6 in contract) vs the CitySnap/RLS listings (2 different ones):

https://streeteasy.com/building/zeckendorf-towers

https://www.citysnap.com/NY/New-York/1-Irving-Place

The current fragmentation is much larger than it was 2 years ago.

Citysnap/Urbandigs get a direct feed from the RLS. Non RLS listings don't get picked up, in the Irving place listing on Streeteasy there are a number of non-rls listings.

Does Streeteasy get their sales listings from RLS or scraping, or is that direct upload as well like the rental listings?

SE is direct upload for all listing as I think r he want to charge for sales listings also at some point of time like they do for rental listings.

SE is direct upload for all listing as I think THEY want to charge for sales listings also at some point of time like they do for rental listings.

Streeteasy used to get a direct feed from all brokers. They stopped a few years ago, their reason was listing integrity. So now agents / brokers have to manually upload their listings to Streeteasy.

Keith, What is RLS? Is it the same as OLR? Do various brokerages use OLR to load to their own websites?

Rebny listing service (RLS). Olr gets a feed from the RLS.

What's interesting and a little bit confusing is the guy behind Real Plus is the one that put the architecture in place to create a shared listing system among New York City brokerages. Many of you won't remember this, since there was no mls in New York City (at least one that functioned), every brokerage had their own listings, and for the most part didn't share. So when you were hunting for an apartment you wound up having to deal with multiple agents/brokers.

Brooklyn remained like this even through the 90s. There were no rebny member brokers in Brooklyn, I think Corcoran were the first ones to break round there? And that opened the door to what you see today. For some of the 'old timers' on here you will remember that Court Street seemed like it had a dozen small brokers in storefronts, with no one sharing listings. So you would walk up and down the street and walk into each agency if you were looking for a home in that part of Brooklyn!

I may have some of the details incorrect, but I think that's pretty accurate.

Keith Burkhardt
TBG

Why do you guys think SE started charging for rental listings first?

I am guessing they expected less of a revolt from real estate brokers for rentals and they are making money by “email agent” and “featured agent” in sales.

A few points worth elaborating on

Citysnap originally advertised to the broker community that they would have the most robust coverage eliminating the need to search multiple sites. They later walked this back by advertising all RLS listings would be included. I knew right then that at best Citysnap was not going to be the Streeteasy killer they were promoting it as. I also went through tons of I.T. upgrades and new systems implementations in my prior career and they weren't doing a fraction of the preparation I would expected from the launch of a new system in a new market. I realize they adopted Citysnap from an existing system used in other parts of the country...but our market is different enough that this required User Acceptance Testing. I had provided this feedback when Citysnap sent out an email asking brokers what they were prioritizing in a system. They responded positively to my feedback and asked me to provide feedback with them on the (fast approaching) launch- but the timing for me couldn't have been any worse. Had they asked a few months prior, I had more bandwidth to assist.

My core territory as a broker is from the West 90's to the West 160's. This matters in the discussion a great deal as it highlights the data discrepancies between each of the systems. I have long argued that I can't use the stats provided that everyone else uses because I always believed that there were way too many missing data points for any accurate representation of the neighborhoods I covered. In the first few days of this year, I decided to get serious about this- and I set aside several hours to review the underlying data. I knew to gain legitimacy I would need to review multiple neighborhoods- but as a reasonable starting point, I reviewed just one neighborhood. Hamilton Heights was selected as it's a small enough neighborhood and data points that I could dedicate the appropriate amount of time to do a detailed review. At the beginning of the year I found that the RLS - which included OLR, Urban Digs and other feeds were missing or had outdated info about 79% of the listings in Hamilton Heights (mostly they were missing). I had run a similar test midyear, just prior to the launch of Citysnap (and it wouldn't have mattered since they were using RLS data only- which was already being captured) and came up with about 47% of listings being missing or outdated (outdated defined as Temp off market/Perm off market or In Contract vs still available- and this wasn't an issue of the status having been changed within 24 hours either- these were significant delays in almost all cases).

The key to the majority of my data issues was that the RLS doesn't reflect where many brokers are inputting their listings. Up in my neck of the woods, a lot of agents are using OneKey to enter their listings (and not using the RLS since they may not be REBNY brokers). The RLS does not have any agreement with OneKey- so naturally all of these systems are not capturing the listings. Zillow tells you where they captured the listing from- and it seems to have a 2 way data flow with Streeteasy- so Zillow captures Streeteasy listings, and Streeteasy captures all the OneKey listings that were originally entered into Zillow. I spoke to Noah at Urban Digs, and it caused him to give some additional thought on adding OneKey into his dataset- though I haven't followed up with him on the matter since.

For me I find OLR to be most useful but filled with bugs and it works very slowly, while Streeteasy has the most complete data- but don't love their bullying tactics- making it ripe to fall should someone be willing to truly tackle the issues. Citysnap uses pictures and mapping better than any of the other systems- but overall feel like its not a robust system- and overall feel it's been largely unusable for me.

As to Streeteasy asking for manual uploads...we moved away from this type of method in the securities industry (my prior career) years ago because multiple points of data entry also leads to error filled systems.

A broker's work is bi-directional -- you want to push all your listings out to as many people as possible, and you want to be able to take in as many listings, with as much information about them, as possible.

But that's just the first step, really: we need to know details about listings that aren't ever going to be in the system. Examples might information about what the co-op board is like, information about what litigation the building is involved in, information about how the view out of the apartment is going to change.

As far as I'm concerned, my listings "push out" well enough in the current system -- I have a sale and a rental active now, and one has a contract out and one has an accepted offer, so those systems are doing their job.

But in terms of info "coming in" -- OLR, the system that most small brokers and some big brokers use, is somewhat better than everything else, although as Uptown Specialist points out, it's not completely comprehensive, so you're always doing "fill-in" searches.

(At one point one of the top eight brokerages wasn't on it; at another point, one of the top five brokerages was using "coming soon" to end-run REBNY rules, but things were moving so fast you had to stay on top of those emails rather than use any search engine. That seems to have ended, but now the new phrase seems to be "quietly available.")

Citysnap, for its part, still seems small -- It declares I'm in the "Top 25%" of NYC agents, and I do shockingly low volume by the standards of most of the big teams -- and it's always trying to sell me stuff. If I wanted a more active presence on Google, I'd be more active on Google. But I really think it's too early to call.

ali r.
{upstairs realty}

Large portions of Brooklyn, Queens and The Bronx are also likely to have listings on OneKey.

Citysnap has started consumer facing advertising with "wraps" of some vacant retail spaces in Soho and NoHo.

I think a missed opportunity for CitySnap is that REBNY "data integrity initiative" is total bullshit. Shortly after their new person in charged took the job I emailed her with a number of listings with clearly fictional room/bedroom counts. Rather than simply looking at the listings (which were sent as links to StreetEasy) her answer was that StreetEasy was not from RLS (note at the time there was no public facing RLS interface, nor any direct access to the database period). So I re-sent the same listings with links from UrbanDigs (which contained the exact same data) and even after several follow ups never heard back from her. Giving zero f*cks about the quality of listings data when it's 100% within your power to force accuracy isn't a great recipe for consumer acceptance. But REBNY has had the same issue with this for 30 years which is that the big firms see their IT as giving them a competitive advantage so they have always talked about an MLS like website run by REBNY with everyone cooperating but behind the scenes sabotaging efforts to make it a functional reality.

Unless there is an active and frequent enforcement accompanied with stiff fines from Licensing Office and AG, there is no incentive for brokers, REBNY or listing sites to spend resources on correcting listings.

AG wants big cases which will make headlines and give them political mileage rather than fining a licensed real estate sales person who makes less than $100k per year. But where the hell is Licensing Office enforcement. I am sure it is not funded much.

It also seems that consumers don't complain either as there is very little actual economic harm due to incorrect description (not counting wasted time) in my opinion due to the consumers in NYC being represented by buyer's brokers and attorneys and of course having an opportunity to get a professional like an architect/inspector before buying.

Wait and see if there is a market correction. When everyone is making piles of money you don't see complaints. But when people realize they made bad decisions purchasing places which have gone down substantial amounts of money, some of them will decide that it can't be their fault so they must have been cheated and finally then start to look for misrepresentations back when they purchased.

30,

We have had market declines in real estate before but compared to the number or misstatements in the coop listings there have been very few lawsuits / regulatory actions for the misstatement reason - at least from what I see without having a precise statistical analysis. I say coops as a very high percentage of condo listings are accurate when it comes to square footage matching offering plan.

@nada yesterday's email " I want to inform you of a new exclusive at xxx, which cannot go into the computer at the owner's request"

Sounds like the owner is trying to hide it from someone?

Sounds like the broker convinced the owner to make that request.

To what end?

Brokers love pocket listings.
https://www.urbandigs.com/forum/index.php?threads/pocket-listings-yes-or-no.148/