Errol Samuelson promoted to Chief Strategy Officer at MOVE

MOVE published a release today announcing that Errol Samuelson has been promoted to Chief Strategy Officer, expanding his role at the company. The full press release is below. You may not know that Errol was once part of the most powerful team in real estate. I call them the four horseman  - Errol plus Marty Frame, Prem Luthra, Ben Grabowski. All four have gone on to great success. Marty Frame is a leader at RPR. Prem Luthra is a leader at Real Estate Digital. And, Ben Grabowski is a leader at CoreLogic. They play pivotal roles in four of the [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:24:38-07:00April 4th, 2013|Main category, Press Releases|0 Comments

Move releases the new Realtor.com Brand

We have seen some re-branding released recently from leading real estate consumer brands. Today we see the release of the new Realtor.com – where home happens. Last year saw the rebirth of Century 21 – Stronger, Bolder, Faster. These are very well recognized consumer brands. MOVE EVP Marketing, Barbara O’Connor and her team took a close look at the Realtor.com brand within a year of her arrival at the company. I am excited to see how this new treatment works out. I can assure you that they have likely exhausted focus groups to predictably make a selection that reaches their [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:24:40-07:00March 5th, 2013|Main category, MLS Insights|2 Comments

Listhub expands publisher filtering

With listing syndication expanding to 50 or more websites, brokers are challenged to keep up with the features, policies, and display rules of each site. In an effort to help brokers understand the differences between publisher websites, Listhub provides a broker dashboard that spells out the differences and enables brokerages to filter out websites that the broker does not like. Listhub expanded their filtering based upon feedback that they received from their customers including MLSs, Brokers, and Franchise Organizations. The new features are: Refreshes Daily: The publisher posts new or updated listing information at least once a day. No For Sale By [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:24:48-07:00November 8th, 2012|Broker Technology Research, Main category|0 Comments

Point2 encourages publishers to play nice

Yardi subsidiary, Point2 is changing its data distribution policies to align with what it believes to be the interests of MLSs, Associations, Brokers and agents in the US, similar to what it has introduced in Canada with the Canadian Real Estate Association (CREA). Since Yardi purchased Point2, they have renewed determination to protect the data rights of agents, brokers, and their partner Associations of REALTORS(r) and MLS. In the past, the default distribution setting for Point2 has been broker-opt out rather than broker opt-in.  WAV Group has never been in favor of Broker Opt-out programs. Broker opt-out means that unless notified [...]

Move Announces 2x More Revenue than Zillow

Today, there are two front-runners in online property search – Zillow and Move. They are both public companies. Falling in line behind them are two private companies, Homes.com and Trulia. Here is how the revenue stacks up on the public companies. Move, Inc., Operators of Realtor.com who is in partnership with AOL Real Estate and MSN real estate for publishing broker listings reported revenue of $47.7 million today. Move did not report any earnings or losses. Seattle Upstart Zillow has been on a run, increasing traffic to levels comparable with Move and purchasing companies. They reported revenue of $22.8M and [...]

Listhub launches new dashboard

Years ago, before ListHub, Point2, and Postlets, – if a broker wanted to publish listings to a third party consumer facing website, they would need to hand enter the listing or manufacture a data feed. ListHub was among the pioneering companies that helped brokers solve this problem. Today, in most MLS markets around the nation, ListHub offers a free service to brokers that will send broker listings to hundreds of websites. Today, ListHub released an upgrade to this system that offers more brokers options and flexibly in choosing their publisher partners. For MLSs, ListHub now allows you to share your opinion about each [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:25:05-07:00April 25th, 2012|Broker Technology Research, Main category|2 Comments

REALTOR.Com Shoots across bow of Trulia and Zillow

The industry knows the dirty little secret. Many third party listing websites are full of garbage data. In a major online marketing effort, REALTOR.com is telling this story. Inaccurate listings are not appearing here and there, but more than half the "for sale" listings on many sites populated from syndication are duplicates, already sold, expired, pending, or bank owned homes that are not for sale at all. Bad real estate listing information is bad for the real estate industry. So many of these sites claim to be consumer centric, but they blatantly and knowingly allow data to be fed to their [...]

Figuring Out The Non-Dues Revenue Equation

As membership numbers have declined, many MLSs and Associations are feeling more and more pressure to reduce their dependence on dues based revenues. At the same time, the cost of running an MLS is increasing. Members are more demanding for the scope of services they expect while they expect the pace of improvements and enhancements to keep up with the ever-increasing speed of technology innovations available today. Third, members are under increasing pressure to offer better service and information to their customers, putting even more pressure on the MLS to deliver comprehensive, accurate data and seamlessly integrate to third party [...]

MOVE launches the Real Estate Network for Franchises

Franchise Networks have taken the first step to declare their independence from the MLS rules and regulations, and third party listing websites. Today MOVE, operators of REALTOR.com and the Listhub listing syndication network, announced that they have created a data sharing solution called the Real Estate Network. Participant in the network include the two largest REALOGY networks of Century 21 and Coldwell Banker along with Realty Executives and RE/MAX. Under the terms of the agreement, the four participating Franchise Organizations will reciprocate in a listing data share of property listings for public display each other’s franchise websites. New Century 21 [...]

Trend MLS launches Find from MOVE

It has been about a year now, and Move has successfully launched the Find product into many of the nations’ leading MLSs. In score with this roll out, today Find launched in Trend MLS, serving 15 counties in southern Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware is the latest MLS to launch the product. You may know that Trend MLS is what industry insiders call a “home grown” system – meaning that they are responsible for programming the MLS software. Owning the code and having programmers on staff means that tighter and more elegant implementations of third party products are possible within the [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:25:18-07:00January 10th, 2012|Main category, MLS Insights|0 Comments

Great Vendors Embrace Rules

There has been a lot of conversational concern about companies that enter into new verticals of data management and service offerings. Four such instances were announced this year. REALTORS® Property Resource contracts with LPS for data services and LPS subcontracts to Real Estate Digital. Zillow purchased an IDX vendor, Diverse Solutions. MOVE purchased Threewide, the providers of the popular Listhub syndication service. CoreLogic launched a new appraisal tool leveraging MLS data. In every case, the vendor has been virtuous and adhered to contracts and data use rules. In each of these cases, many feared that data could be misused or [...]

AOL-MOVEing in on property portals

Large consumer search portals like Google, Yahoo, and AOL have had an interesting, if not mystical strategy toward real estate. Today, AOL made an announcement to become a syndication channel for real estate listings. Perhaps AOL is going against the grain, or perhaps they finally found a great partner who made it easy for them to get enough quality listings on their site to make it a viable search solution for property. In today’s announcement, AOL Real Estate search will be powered by Move through the ListHub Syndication Network. No doubt, the strategy for AOL and Move fits. Both companies [...]