The Real Estate Board of New York (REBNY), the NYC equivalent of an MLS, has launched the Trulia built search engine/portal Residential NYC.com. Consumers can now freely search exclusive sale listings of REBNY members, without having to get inky fingers from checking The New York Times classifieds or visiting each broker’s website — and non-REBNY members can get a look-see at members’ listings in one place. They can also search rental property listings and recently sold homes. The unveiling and demo of the site was done Thursday by REBNY President Steven Spinola at the midtown office.
This is a big deal in New York and may hurt The New York Times high priced newspaper classifieds, the time-honored “for sale” listing site for New Yorkers’ eyeballs. Some of the larger real estate brokerages, The Corcoran Group, Prudential Douglas Elliman and Bellmarc Realty, are currently on the sidelines and not adding their listings. No word on whether the participating firms are posting all their listings.
According to The Real Deal, Neil Binder, co-founder of Bellmarc Realty, said that his company was not ready to join, yet.
They didn’t show me it was really a critical thing to have. They made no effort to promote it to the public. When they launch it, no one will know about it…
Anything that serves buyers, I will participate in …. anything that will make me money, that’s what I’m here for.”
We think the site may have legs, but only if everyone jumps on board the good ship.
Technorati Tags: REBNY, NYC real estate, real estate search, trulia, Bellmarc, Corcoran Group, Prudential Douglas Elliman, Steven Spinola
I wonder what the value of “portals” is and will be into the future. Everybody was focused on lead generation in the lasy few years, now everyone is focused on bringing listings to the public. I think web 3.0 is going to look alot more like web 1.0 than 2.0 (ht to ozone). md
Whatever it becomes, money will have to be involved.