Editor’s note: A previous version of this story stated that MRED would provide historical listings data to Move Inc. for display on Realtor.com in return for member access to Move’s ‘Find’ search tool. An MRED spokesman said the MLS has not yet granted Move that right.
Midwest Real Estate Data LLC’s 37,000 member brokers, agents and appraisers will soon gain access to Move’s natural language search engine platform, “Find,” the companies said.
In the past, Move has offered to provide the Find search platform to multiple listing services and Realtor associations that provide Realtor.com with sold and off-market listings data.
A Move spokewsoman, Julie Reynolds, said MRED’s sold listings data will initially be visible only to MRED members using the Find tool, but that Move expects to make them available to consumers searching Realtor.com later this year.
MRED spokesman Jeff Lasky said the Lisle, Ill.-based MLS has not yet granted Move that right.
“We’re not giving sold data at this point for Move to use anyplace else,” other than within the Find platform, Lasky said. “Anything else that’s going to happen down the road is not in place at this time.”
Although nearly all of the nation’s roughly 900 MLSs provide active listing data to Realtor.com, most don’t provide the kind of historical listing data consumers can access in some markets through Virtual Office Websites, or VOWs, offered by brokerages like ZipRealty and Redfin.
MRED’s territory encompasses the metro Chicago market and northern Illinois and extends into southern Wisconsin and northwest Indiana. With about 120,000 listings, MRED claims to be the nation’s largest MLS by listing inventory.
Reynolds said that the Find platform is now available to more than 300,000 MLS members nationwide. Most recently, Move has entered into licensing agreements with the Greater Las Vegas Association of Realtors (GLAR); Atlanta, Ga.-based First Multiple Listing Service (FMLS); and Plattsburgh, N.Y.-based Adirondack-Champlain Valley MLS (ACVMLS).
Move has similar agreements in place with the Houston Association of Realtors Inc., the Tucson Association of Realtors, and Intermountain MLS, which covers southern Idaho and eastern Oregon.
MRED last month announced that it would provide sold listings data to CoreLogic’s analytics program, Partner InfoNet, which aims to generate revenue by using sold listing data to generate analytics on housing markets and providing those analytics to lenders, Wall Street investors, and government agencies.
MRED said it was also in negotiations to provide sold listings data to a CoreLogic rival, Realtors Property Resource (RPR), a subsidiary of the National Association of Realtors.
CoreLogic is sharing revenue with MLSs and Realtor associations that provide listing data to Partner InfoNet, with more generous splits reserved for those that provide data on an exclusive basis.
Instead of a revenue split, Move and RPR are offering partners providing historical listings access to tools, such as RPR’s parcel-centric property database.
Move says its Find search platform allows MLSs to provide members with “fast, flexible and easy access to all of the data from the Move Network of real estate web sites via a powerful, robust and intuitive search engine.”
The Find database includes 109 million properties and also provides information on schools, neighborhoods and local amenities, plus automated valuations on non-listed properties from multiple sources.
Find’s natural language processor facilitates searches with typed requests like “three bedroom homes for sale in Naperville with a pool between 600k and 800k,” or “condo in Chicago with deck.”
MRED subscribers will have password-protected access to data and functionality not available to consumers on Move’s consumer-facing websites, the company said.
Last month, MRED also announced a licensing deal to provide members with access to an interactive housing market analytics tool, “The Thing,” from 10K Research and Marketing.
That tool is capable of using MRED listing data to produce customized charts showing data points such as homes for sale, average days on market, and months’ supply of inventory filtered by criteria such as property type, price range, and neighborhood or ZIP code.
