Your Condo World Blog

By Peter Daoust

In the August 31st edition of The Globe & Mails Report On Business, reporter Stever Ladurantaye wrote an article entitled “Brokerages Plot Rival Listing Site”.

Here, in part is what it was about. Rogers Communication Inc. a company we love or hate and a company that posted an income in 2009 of something like $1.5 Billion has helped develop a real estate website called Zoocasa. It has lots of fancy new bells and whistles and agents can post their active MLS listings on it for free.

So what you might say? Well, Yahoo Canada (Yahoo Inc. made 862 Million in 2009) has just announced it will offer listings on its main search page using the database and real-time search technology from Zoocasa.com.

So that in part is what Steve’s article was all about. He went on to point out that the people at Remax, Royal Lepage and Century 21 have “iconic brands that have been built over years”. Suddenly, an outside entity, Zoocasa with no real mandate to “trade in real estate” is out there making money off the needs people have to look at homes and condos on the internet.

Obviously they wouldn’t be focusing on this task if they couldn’t make money from doing it, but look at the number of sponsors they have. Check out their swimming pool sponsor people, their carpet people, their home security people and their window and door people. To make their site even better, they have thrown in a section about all the schools in every area which is something the industry funded Realtor.ca website has not yet opted to do.

What The Globe and Mail article says is that many of the leading real estate brokerage companies are now meeting to try and agree to an alternative listing site that would pool their offerings.

If you find all of this to be a strange shift consider that Steve’s article goes on to mention that Zillow, in the United States has become a major hub for listings and a major headache for the brokerages that used to control the flow of information. What Steve didn’t mention is that Zillow was founded in 2005 by Rich Barton and Lloyd Frink, former Microsoft executives and founders of Microsoft spinoff Expedia. Think of he internet savvy that these types of people have and the money behind them to make it all happen.

What this Globe and Mail article forgot to mention or purposely decided not to is that there are hundreds of top agents out there across the country trying also to brand their personal names. Ian Watt, in Vancouver has a colorful and somewhat edgy condo website often giving him top rankings and in the Toronto area Remax Condo Plus seems to own the net.

One fine point in Steve Ladurantaye ‘s article and an interesting one is that the previously mentioned brokerages intend to build their own site and control what features are offered and upgrade the technology they see fit without having to go through CREA, the trade association that represents the country 100,000 agents. Their reasoning for being allowed to take this approach is that they have better access to accurate, up to date information, than do third party syndications and they are the ones therefore that should be allowed to do it.

Is it a case of the more things change the more they stay the same? In this case the answer is no. Rogers and Yahoo are flexing their muscles and they really don’t have much to lose!