One million free leads for real estate agents coast-to-coast. A slate of exceptional industry leaders announced as new officers of our Board of Managers to lead us into next year. A new video testimonial with a slew of agents sharing why consumers will love the Homesnap app and why it’s better than anything else out there.

Research from Hitwise showing the Broker Public Portal (BPP) with Homesnap is now the second largest MLS consumer website. A record 875,000 agents and brokers now have access to the BPP with Homesnap through their MLS. And we’re beginning to hear a new rallying cry from those agents whose MLS have yet to sign with BPP, saying, “I Want My BPP!”The Broker Public Portal with Homesnap continues to take the industry by storm during the 2nd Quarter. Our story is being told again and again. We’ve garnered significant coverage in all the major real estate trades, including Inman News, RIS Media, RE Technology, REAL Trends, Housingwire, Realty Times, Realty Biz News, Property Portal Watch, Real Estate Rama, Chicago/ Atlanta/ Miami/ Houston Agent magazines online, and from top Bloggers nationwide.

Making an Impact

In the last few months, the BPP has been making an impact on multiple fronts. Within the industry,  we’ve signed up new MLS partners, driving record levels of adoption among major new customers like those in the Pacific Northwest. We’ve also debuted new ways to get our story told throughout the industry by leveraging the power of social media, mass media and video to keep building momentum.

For example, the front page of the Monday Business print edition of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune on May 7th shouted: “Brokers launch a rival to Zillow” (2.6 mb PDF). Featuring an interview with now BPP Chairman John Mosey, head of Minneapolis-based NorthstarMLS, the article details BPP’s plan, the business momentum it’s built, and the growing impact BPP is having on the entire real estate industry. It’s a showcase piece that represents how earnestly successful the BPP with Homesnap has become in such a short time.

If you haven’t seen the new video testimonials from an array of BPP’s supporters – many of the real estate industry’s most influential leaders — talking about the importance of BPP and the Homesnap apps, checkout Homesnap’s YouTube channel here. The research that shows the online popularity of Homesnap was the subject of a must-read WAV Group blog by Marilyn Wilson, “Broker Public Portal is the #2 MLS Consumer-Facing Website!,” showing it is second only to the long-time perennial champ, the Houston Association of Realtors.

Homesnap continues to make new improvements, most recently expanding its social media and online advertising by forging a partnership with Facebook to help agents better target potential homebuyers. Homesnap is offering agents Facebook’s Dynamic Ads for Real Estate that will automatically advertise listings to Facebook users who have previously searched for that listing, or even a similar property, on a brokerage’s website or Homesnap.com.

All of these developments mark the rapid growth of BPP and are a prelude of what’s to come as BPP with Homesnap continues its quest to align more MLSs behind a movement that continues to grow in the real estate industry.

What Lies Ahead

In the coming months, BPP will remain in the news in a new way. Each month, RIS Media’s Real Estate magazine will feature a major column authored by a supporter of the BPP. RIS Media, a strong supporter of our industry, has also been supporting BPP’s efforts and those of its members since the beginning.

The new monthly BPP feature in Real Estate magazine will help drive home our story to more agents, brokers, and MLS industry staff and executives on the value of the BPP with Homesnap and how vital this movement is to our industry’s future. The columns will not only be in the printed and digital versions of the magazine, which are distributed to tens of thousands of locations, but also online at RISMedia.com. The columns will be in RIS Media’s daily newsletters, which reaches hundreds of thousands of real estate professionals each day.

Only $1 Per Agent

The bottom line as the BPP with Homesnap movement continues to grow, and the impact of its business momentum increases is that it all comes down to $1. That’s the investment BPP is seeking from local MLSs to provide consumers with a better home search experience. Just $1 per agent per month. One dollar to make sure we provide consumers with the same comprehensive, real-time MLS data used by real estate professionals, so they don’t have to settle for bad data. One dollar to ensure that the real estate information consumers use come from the people who list and sell homes, not ads.