Century 21 Launches ListTrac for Analytics on Portal Marketing

In an email blast to Century 21 brokers and agents last week, Century 21 released the Golden Ruler powered by ListTrac, a reporting tool that allows sellers, agents, and brokers to see the engagement that a property is getting across the Internet. Portals like Zillow, Realtor.com, Trulia, and Homes.com are shown side by side with Century 21's family of sites and partner sites along with MLS systems, consumer sites and HomeSnap. In fact, any real estate website can easily have ListTrac monitoring configured.

ListTrac is replacing ListHub, which has powered the Golden Ruler since the offering was released. ListHub will terminate on April 30th, 2019.

The reports are beautifully designed to allow an agent to enroll their seller in weekly updates. The reports are branded to Century 21, the broker, and the agent. They include images of the property and a summary of views and leads.

WAV Group believes that this release could be the beginning of a significant change in how sellers perceive listing syndication. Consumers and agents will get a more complete picture of their online marketing. Other insights can be gleaned—for example, a lot of people are viewing homes on portals, but the ratio of views to leads is low. This will be a surprise to consumers, I am sure. Now Century 21 agents will be able to educate sellers on where potential buyers truly come from.

Moreover, I think that the consumer will be impressed when they see the volume of impressions and communications that happen on a property in the MLS ecosystem. Data that I have seen shows that MLS systems have property engagement on par with the portals. Over 75 MLSs are partnered with ListTrac with ListTrac monitoring implemented within MLS systems such as Rapattoni, Matrix and flexMLS. Some MLSs that have launched ListTrac have required every IDX vendor to install the monitoring code. ListTrac monitoring is now implemented on more than 250,000 real estate websites across more than 250 different real estate vendors.

ListTrac's CEO, Trent Gardner, was recognized by the Real Estate Standards Organization for outstanding contributions to the Internet tracking workgroup and says they are launching a RESO compliant metrics API in Q3. Perhaps the most significant contribution that ListTrac is making to the real estate industry is real time data on where consumers are engaging with property listings.

Century 21 agents and brokers will see the MLS system metrics and metrics from Homesnap (the Broker Public Portal) in markets that have implemented ListTrac. I would expect that more MLSs will install the ListTrac utility now that major brands are adopting the seller reports. Heck, it would be rather self-inflicting not to.