HomeServices of America and Keller Williams are among the first major brokerages to enable Cotality’s new Broker Listing Exchange (BLX). BLX is a listing management platform designed to help brokerages manage listing data before distributing it to MLSs, portals, and other partners.
But CEO Chris Kelly said the system Cotality has built also reflects broader changes in how major brokerages are thinking about listing data, distribution and management.
In an interview with Inman, Kelly said the traditional model of first entering listing data into local MLS systems and then receiving aggregated feedback on brokerage websites and other tools has become “obsolete.” Instead, HomeServices wants to start within its own systems before distributing list data downstream, he said.
Kelly emphasized that BLX is not intended to bypass MLS or function as a private listing network. But he also described the platform as a hedge against an increasingly fragmented data landscape where MLSs, portals and brokerages are each making strategic decisions to protect their own interests.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Inman: Our launch materials describe the industry’s current listing data process as fundamentally backward. What does that mean?
Chris Kelly: Historically, we would input listing data into the MLS and then take a feed of that aggregated data along with IDX and other listings to populate our website and other applications we use.
This is the opposite of having all your data first in its own location and then sending it to a destination of your choice.
So when I say backwards, what I mean is the idea of building it piecemeal into someone else’s system and then bringing a collective version of it back to us.
Historically, it was fine. The system is set up this way, but I don’t think the system was set up specifically to do that. We’ve been doing these things for decades at this point, but every now and then we have to stop and ask ourselves: “Does it even make sense to do it this way anymore?”
When I stop and think about it, I don’t think it makes sense to do it that way anymore.
Why now? And why Kotality?
Kelly: Why now? Because so much is changing. Even if someone tells you exactly what the landscape will look like a year from now, they are making a guess at best.
This is not the kind of play where I’m convinced MLS and data distribution will be positioned like this in a year, or even three years. It’s really a play about, “We don’t know exactly what it’s going to be like in a year or three years.” I know it’s going to be different.
So now is the time to put your data in its own place and decide where to distribute it from there.
That could mean that a year from now, it will be distributed in the exact same places it is today. But if you look at MLS right now, as we’ve seen with MRED and other teams over the past few weeks, they’re all doing their own thing and everything is changing very quickly.
As these conditions change, it has become very clear that we first need to control the information. That way, no matter how things change, we are in a position to evolve much more easily than the decentralized and highly divergent way we currently operate. Specifically, we enter this content into 243 MLSs individually for each listing.
As for Cotality, it’s a Cotality product. When we thought about whether to build it ourselves or partner with someone to build it, we didn’t necessarily think that we needed to build it in-house. By working with partners like Cotality, we can now build products faster. Cotality provides CoreLogic products to approximately 100 of the 450 MLSs nationwide. Of the more than 240 MLSs we participate in, approximately 50 are CoreLogic.
Is BLX a response to MRED and other MLSs pursuing broader domestic listing strategies?
Kelly: We were developing this long before that announcement came out.
To me, it reinforces why we’re doing it. That wasn’t the trigger, but once it happened, we all looked at each other and said: This is one of the reasons we’re doing this.
This is the first stage of how this landscape will change, whether it’s how portals get business or how MLSs do business.
Basically, you want to make sure everything is in one place and control distribution from there.
Does BLX have a private listing or delayed marketing component?
Kelly: No, that’s not the main factor.
One of the other use cases is when we’re running the Zillow preview program for upcoming listings, one of the challenges we face is getting a single feed of those listings into Zillow that we don’t have to do manually.
This is an example of useful pre-marketing. However, this does not bode well for having a PLN.
Now, if tomorrow the world explodes on this front and all these aggregators, whether it’s MLS or whatever, disappear or change dramatically, as intermediaries we’re going to have to have our own distribution channels, but having something like this at least allows us to be prepared for that.
But that’s not a preemptive reason why we do it.
Brokerage leaders including Hoby Hanna and Robert Refkin say brokerages need more control over listings and listing data. Is BLX part of the same philosophical shift?
Kelly: I think there’s a lot of agreement among different industry players when it comes to the idea of control.
Control does not necessarily mean ownership. I don’t think we’ve ever wondered who owns our data. It’s spelled out in your MLS contract, your Participant Agreement, and when you provide it to portals and everything else, or even when your photographer takes a photo.
So I’m not really worried about the ownership aspect. But it’s about control. Control in the sense that there are a lot of cooks in the kitchen right now who are working on list content aggregation and list content distribution, rather than control in a “I want to close it, keep it close to my chest, and keep it away from other people” kind of way.
On a fundamental level, we think that for all the hard work that our agents and brokers do to accumulate that, the sweat and tears that go into just getting a listing, and that listing becomes photos and content and other intellectual property, we should be doing something about it.
From there, we partner with any partner that makes sense, whether it’s a portal, an MLS, or whatever it is. But we believe that in order to effectively partner with them, we first need to know all of this information.
Now, it’s being launched all over the world, on different MLSs and on different portals. Additionally, there are secondary applications around the world that fragment information and extract insights. We feel like we should have all of that first, rather than putting it out in shotgun fashion all over the world and then taking it back and putting it together like a puzzle in the back.
That’s where we can say we’re going backwards. And I think many securities companies across the country probably feel the same way.
Beyond reducing duplicate entries, what value does HomeServices expect to gain from centralizing list data?
Kelly: There are several markets where our agents and brokers are affiliated with multiple MLSs, which often requires dual entry. This method allows you to enter information once and distribute it across multiple MLSs. This is a surface-level issue, but if you ask our agents about entering the dual market, it’s a reality.
Then obviously MLS consolidation will continue to happen. Having your data in one place allows you to adapt to the world much more quickly when such events occur.
Insight is part of it. You can explore our HomeServices data, broker by broker, market by market, and see what’s happening with your listing content, giving you better insight and predictions about what’s happening in your market.
Which markets are seeing more price corrections? Where are properties sitting idle for too long? Which markets are hot? Having this type of information available in real time allows you to use those insights to respond more quickly to agents and consumers.
The presentation materials mention support for AI. What does that mean in a practical sense?
Kelly: For us and the partners we have selected, they have been a leader in the world of data analytics for many years. You and I both know that sometimes just saying “AI” makes you think it’s some sort of magic. It just happens.
For us, speed to market is what really matters. Get insights faster by layering smartly deployed AI on top of that data with the help of data analytics partners. This allows for the analysis needed to determine what is going on in what can sometimes be a very manual process.
We have decades of list data at this point, but there’s so much information that it can be difficult for someone to just sit down and crunch the numbers. You can do it, but by the time you’re done with it, you’re three months into the next quarter. For us, it’s really the speed to insight and the speed of knowledge that you get by layering AI on top of the analytics that you get from that.
You said this is not an anti-MLS move. But what do you think about that now that MLS itself is making its own decisions about its future?
Kelly: Our position on this last conversation is that in some cases, it makes sense to have more limited public exposure, as has been the case for decades. However, we believe that in most cases this list deserves maximum exposure. The system we have now provides that level of exposure by putting assets into the MLS, and that’s not the system we’re trying to undermine.
But what we’re seeing since the changing landscape and growing antitrust concerns over the past three years is that everyone is minding their own business. I didn’t receive a letter from MLS saying, “I’m going to the national league soon, are you okay?”
These MLSs make independent decisions based on what they think is best for them in a particular market, and are not necessarily voted on by all participants. I have no control over what they are going to do. And it’s clear that we don’t think we’re done with this world yet. In the last two weeks, I’ve seen three people say they’re going to go all over the country and get a national feed. More MLSs will likely enter the market in the future.
So this is really just a hedge. You need to do this anyway. But looking at what’s going on with MLSs today, looking at the MLSs themselves, and determining what kind of relationship they have in the future real estate landscape is where we feel this is going to be really important.
Is that regulatory pressure part of the equation?
KELLY: There’s a lot of reactionary stuff going on. This is our attempt to be proactive in a world that has been so reactionary over the past 12 months. There, everything seems to be a necessary reaction to a previous sudden decision, which creates a new sudden decision.
What we’re trying to do is position ourselves to not be reactive. We are not forced to react immediately to anything. We are in a position to be proactive as this situation evolves, as we are in a position to take advantage of whatever happens.
After the compensation increase from MLS, what we said publicly was that we thought this was free for MLS. Not having to manage remuneration between brokerages and not having to be involved in how we do business from a regulatory perspective means we can focus on being a really good data aggregator and data distributor.
It’s supposed to be free to MLS. Some of them really embrace that world. I think others will have a hard time accepting what it means to be a truly high-end technology partner to the securities industry, as opposed to the regulators that MLSs have traditionally found on their own.
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