Real estate listing data is something I’ve been passionate about since starting a brokerage 15 years ago. In the early days of the portals, I had to personally get involved with local associations, other brokers, and agents. I had to make phone calls to explain that our listing information was ours – that another agent couldn’t take our listing information and photos, place it on Craigslist or Zillow and pretend it was their listing. It was a long battle to explain the process as the whole concept of online marketing of listings was fledgling – few understood the implications and importance. Their response typically was the MLS allows me to put your listings on my sites – which would then require another conversation about how IDX works. (Tangent: for a great read about brokers and agents not knowing about marketing even in 2011, read this post about manipulating listings on “the Google.”) Information about a real estate listing is a hot topic – a few years ago, Inman even had a Data Summit in which I was honored to be able to speak about the topic.
Is Real Estate Listing Data “Out of the Bag?”
And while many brokers worry that the “cat’s out of the bag” when it comes to their listing data, I’m firmly in the other camp. I believe that each and every time a new listing hits the market, it gives the broker another opportunity to stand up for what’s theirs. It gives them an opportunity to decide where and how to market their listings. Does a broker need to market their listings on Trulia to be successful? No. But would they maybe want to in order to get extra exposure? Sure. But it’s still the broker’s decision on what to do with that data. They can easily turn off their feed through their MLS.
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However, there are bad actors in this space, companies that don’t get listing feeds or follow state compliance rules. This is when my team and I get angry and we go into fight mode. As a broker, you should own your data and decide what to do with it. It’s why we were the first investor in Retsly, as that was their mission.
NeighborCity
Do you remember NeighborCity? Back in the early 2010s, the company seemingly began scraping information from various websites to gain access to listing information. While the company states that Realtors wanted to stop them because of their agent rating offering, the truth is that many people were mad because of the listing data that seemed to be copied from their site. When a company scrapes your listings from your website, that’s wrong and that’s when TRIBUS stands up and acts.
Trovit
Today, we sent information to all of our brokerage customers alerting them about a new company, based in Spain that seems to be doing the same thing. The company is called Trovit. (I’m not going to provide a link to help their SEO here. Feel free to Google)
More importantly, they seem to not only be violating copyright laws, but also real estate license laws in each and every state. Their listings indicate that the listing broker is company A when it’s really company B. It seems that they have heavily scraped Zillow, Weichert, and Estately. Don’t blame these companies, it’s easy not to know that this happened. TRIBUS has sent notifications to all three to let them know this is going on though.
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Here’s an example of their listing, next to the actual listing by our client. Notice the Weichert Realtors indicator on the listing. Nowhere else on the page does it indicate that it’s actually a BHHS Vision Real Estate Listing.
This is not only a copyright issue, but it’s a license issue as well. In most states, Missouri included (see paragraph 6), any company advertising listings, regardless whether they have a license or not, must abide by certain rules when showing listing data. That includes following the state requirements for listing disclosure. In nearly every state, it’s required the listing brokerage company name be displayed anywhere their listings appear. In addition, many states require an office address and a phone number. In every case we could find, misrepresenting the listing brokerage is a violation of state licensing laws.
Immediately upon identification, TRIBUS’ system began to block Trovit from scraping data from our clients’ sites. We do this at the DNS level by blocking thousands of bad bots and bad IPs. We even have a hive learning system whereby bad actors on one of our sites are identified and blocked across all of our templated and custom real estate brokerage websites. But we’ve also communicated to our clients they should contact their MLSs, local and state associations, NAR, and their state licensing commissions. Clients in more than 10 states have already responded to the call and contacted these parties. TRIBUS has agreed to help them fight this problem.
As a brokerage owner, listing data is yours. Choose what you want to do with it. But when someone is stealing your listing data, you have an obligation to step in, rise up and do something about it. At TRIBUS, we’re here to stand with you in that fight.
