Today Zillow Group announced the addition of 16 new multiple listing service (MLS) partnerships, arrangements that include a direct listing feed to the real estate portal, the company confirmed.
These partnerships come on the heels of Zillow’s announcement that they will no longer allow manual listing entry. (Brokers that belong to MLSs that have held out still have ways to market their listings on Zillow Group sites.)
When asked if the partnerships were the result of the listing policy change, company spokeswoman Amanda Woolley said: “We’ve been continually building our MLS partnership base over the past three years and will continual to do so. Our goal is to be a partner to every MLS in the industry.”
Through the partnerships, real estate agents are prominently displayed as the listing agent on all of their listings and can receive leads directly from Zillow and Trulia at no cost. Brokerages receive attribution, branding, a link back directly to their websites and daily reporting access.
Included in the announcement was Sacramento-based MetroList PRO, serving over 25,000 brokers and agents, a deal that was inked after the listing new policy went into effect.
When asked how many broker/agents total fall under the umbrella of these 16 new partnerships, Woolley noted that the company “didn’t have exact numbers to share.”
New MLS partners include:
- Hopkinsville Association of Realtors, Hopkinsville, Ky.
- Elko County, Elko, Nev.
- Sheridan County Board of Realtors, Sheridan, Wyo.
- Greater Tyler Association of Realtors, Tyler, Texas
- Silver City Regional MLS, Silver City, N.M.
- West Branch Valley Multiple Listing Service, Williamsport, Pa.
- North Central Oklahoma Board of Realtors, Ponca City, Okla.
- Selma Board of Realtors, Selma, Ala.
- Tri-County Board of Realtors, Neb.
- Norfolk Board of Realtors, Norfolk, Neb.
- Realty Multi-List MLS, Jessup, Ga.
- East Central Iowa Association of Realtors, Dubuque, Iowa
- Humboldt Association of Realtors, Humboldt, Calif.
- Greater Central Louisiana Realtors, Alexandria, La.
- Greater Chattanooga MLS, Chattanooga, Tenn.
“We now have relationships with more than 580 MLSs around the country, offering nearly 2 million agents a simple way to market to the millions of home shoppers visiting Zillow Group apps and websites every month,” said Errol Samuelson, Zillow Group chief industry development officer in a press release.
When asked whether a “direct feed” meant a feed that has all of the MLS’s listings that brokers have opted into, or if in some cases the partnerships involve a direct feed set up by the MLS to send an individual broker’s listings to Zillow, Woolley said: “These MLSs are part of the Zillow Partnership Platform — they have a direct feed. We don’t discuss the specifics of the partnerships, whether the feeds are opt in or opt out.”
Zillow Group’s listing policy change update is an attempt to streamline listing entry process and create “cleaner” data by spurring more MLSs to provide direct feeds.
“The vast majority of listing issues stem from agents manually entering listings,” said Jay Thompson, Zillow Group’s director of industry outreach, on the Facebook group Inman Coast to Coast. “The industry and consumers have been asking/demanding that we clean up our data for years — we are responding to those demands.”
A recently added MLS partner, Sandicor, says the decision to eliminate manual entry was one of a number of “drivers” that led them to sign a direct feed agreement.
