Baron Briefs

For several months, I’ve been working on a new listing product for Realtors. An important component is listing distribution. RealtyBaron already syndicates listings to Vast and allows agents to publish to Craigslist. But our listing product launching in early 2008 will require syndication to each and every listing destination site that accepts bulk feeds. And while RealtyBaron was early early-ish to the distribution game, we’re certainly not alone.

Listing distribution has become ridiculously easy. In just a few hours, I added feeds for CityCribs, Citylist, CLR Search, Oodle, Propbot, Propsmart, Trulia, Zillow, and Google Base. Once the feed format is known, it takes less than a few minutes to start churning out an XML file to feed a destination site.

All of which has me thinking about a future where listings seamlessly flow around the web. Can any one destination site gain a competitive advantage and win the listings race once real estate listings are ubiquitous? Probably not, me thinks. Instead, big destination sites will likely continue squeezing more search, more filtering, more analysis, and more data (sales data, demographics, etc.) into the same 1024 by 768 pixel space in an attempt to make sense of it all. Additionally, make room for more banner advertising to pay for the development of aforementioned features. Which brings me to…

Many Realtors continue to fear losing control of their listings. However, I can imagine an ironic outcome in which losing control of listings produces an explosion of information which eventually overwhelms and/or confuses the consumer. As a result, buyers and sellers who once went to Realtors for access to information increasingly use Realtors to slog through and interrupt the overly abundant data.