ERA Lands On Zillow, One Small Step For A Search Engine, One Giant Step Toward A National MLS

Where were you when you first heard Lady Di was killed?

Where were you when you first heard Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon?

Where were you when you first heard ERA set foot on Zillow?

On Wednesday, 10/24/07, Zillow, the Real Estate Search Engine with the Google Business Model, signed its first bulk load property listing agreement with ERA Franchise Systems LLC. Someone, besides 4 Venture Capital Firms (with 87MM $ votes) must be getting it. But getting what?

Isn't Zillow going to take ERA's data, approach all their homeowners and sell their houses on the Internet at a reduced "Redfin-like-rate", as we've always feared they'd do?

Won't Zillow pull a HomeStore/Move.com-ActiveRain maneuver, make a deal, get the data, pull out at the last minute, then offer a similar service?

Has ERA gone over to the Dark Side?

Have we gone from:

• Zillo-noia: Fear Zillow will steal all our jobs, to
• Zillo-phobia: Fear Zillow will steal all our data, to
• Zillo-tropism: Posting our data on Zillow, to
• Zillo-philia: Loving our listings and advertising on Zillow? 

Doesn't Zillow want all of our commissions, not just a part of our advertising budgets?

The only money in Real Estate is in selling houses, not in selling advertising, right?

What if Zillow got control of all our MLS listings and put them on the Web? Then opened all those listings up to all the Search Engines and even pushed them out to all the Search Engines. And Zillow didn't charge us for it. What if there was one Website with all the homes for sale?

• Doesn't my broker, my MLS and my Realtor.com do that for me already?
• Don't I need my broker, my MLS and my Realtor.com?
• I can't upload my own listings to Zillow myself, can I?
• What could I do with all my office fees, Realtor Assn/MLS fees, and NAR/Realtor.com fees?

Do we really want Zillow to control the National MLS? Won't it be "The Mother of all MLSs"? Will we have to change the name from the "MLS" to the "MLZ", "Multiple Listing Zillow"?

By what Christmas will the Inman Blog post:

"Yes, Virginia, there is a National MLS."?

Posted by: Cliff Jacobson

Adapt Or Die!  Happy Searching.

WebHomeUSAblog; The Blog of Real Estate Search Marketing

Comments

[Jim Lee]

http://nls.point2.com/ has been running a de facto national MLS for over a year now.

NAR is also working on a national real estate data base

[For-sale-by-owner]

Does it mean that any company in the country can by a franchise from Zillow?