Feb. 22, 2012 - Strategic Syndication: Year One
 It has been almost a year since Clareity Consulting began its efforts to bring more attention to listing syndication, starting in earnest at Clareity's 10th Annual MLS Executive Workshop (though we hinted at it a year earlier) and kicking into high gear with the publication of "Syndication to Real Estate Portals: Problems and Solutions".
In that paper and in speeches around the country, Clareity:
- brought visibility to some online publishers' business models that were rapidly becoming offensive to brokers,
- acknowledged the potential benefits of listing syndication but challenged the common wisdom that the profession benefits from listings "everywhere",
- provided a framework (starting with Clareity's "Syndication Bill of Rights") for brokers to logically consider the actual value provided by these websites,
- and introduced the idea that it was time for brokers to consider more strategic syndication.
It has been gratifying the see the response. The industry echoes loudly with pundits following Clareity's lead on their blogs. Brokers are starting to pull thier listings off sites where they aren't getting sufficient value or where the business model offends. MLSs are starting to advocate on behalf of their subscribers against some of the more atrocious business models. And the Council of MLS and others are now discussing moving forward with the "MLS certified listings" idea that we've been advocating for about five years now and which, as we've described more recently, could be a means of MLSs exerting some control over the advertising sites.
But, this fight is far from over. Most brokers are still on autopilot, syndicating to all publishers, and MLSs are still just getting started with their efforts to educate the brokers on strategic syndication and take other actions. And, as we said before, Clareity expects some of the publishers to get even more aggressive in the near future – they must derive as much revenue as possible from each listing to satiate the increasing demands of the investors that have collectively plowed tens of millions of dollars into these sites. And while there are some relatively "white hat" national listing sites, other than Realtor.com with its NAR operating agreement, there really are no rules controlling online publishers.
Clareity expects syndication to get ugly. These sites have a lot of money to throw around, and can act aggressively and more nimbly than our industry leaders can. It has taken years for even a third of MLSs to create public listing sites as a bulwark, and most of those provide a poor user experience, have mostly terrible SEO and local marketing and, even as MLSs fuss about the URLs where their websites can be found, we're losing today's real battle - the mobile experience, which is quickly overtaking the traditional world of web sites in terms of listing traffic.
We've got a lot to talk about and a lot to plan - see you (MLS Executives) at the Workshop in March!
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