Learn How the Real Estate Industry Is Avoiding Economic Meltdown with the Broker Public Portal

Started by a group of MLS executives and brokers who were tired of handing away their value to third parties who took their listings and sold them back the leads generated from their own inventory, Broker Public Portal with Homesnap is the national consumer home search platform built from within the industry and governed by Fair Display Guidelines, which guarantee "your listing, your lead."

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The industry-controlled portal – operating as Homesnap – has become our industry's greatest "overnight" success story. It has generated over one million free leads for REALTORS® across the country and is the number one rated real estate app in App Store.

What Real Estate Can Learn from the Music Industry that's 1/200th the Size It Used to Be

The Northwest Multiple Listing Service (NWMLS) is a broker-owned cooperative MLS with 30,000 agents spread over 2,000 brokerage firms in 23 counties covering about two-thirds of the state of Washington. Its President and CEO, Tom Hurdelbrink, recalls attending a Society of Association Executives conference in Nashville in 2014 and hearing Country Music Association (CMA) leaders talk about managing through a dramatic decline in their financial structure.

"The music industry went from people buying records or CDs or albums to services such as Napster, which basically allowed music to be streamed virtually for free," says Hurdelbrink.

"The CMA's 77-member Board of Directors (BOD) included individuals from the Songwriters Guild of America, Association of Music Producers, the musicians, the radio industry and others. They had very high energy Board of Directors meetings while their industry was crashing and burning. Imagine an industry that today generates 1/200th of the revenue that they used to generate 20 years ago!"

Hurdelbrink talked to two music industry leaders about how they dealt with the declining revenue stream of numerous music companies while streaming business revenues rose. He told them that he operates an MLS that is trying to preserve the brokerage firm's role in the eyes of the consumers and asked what the industry could do to avoid what the music sector experienced.

"They both said there is only one answer. Your members need to get control and run their own service and not use another company because they will take you down. I reported that to our board right at the same time as the BPP was being discussed."

Download the NWMLS Success Story HERE

The Industry Is Stronger Together

As we all know, there are many disruptors coming after real estate. Many of these well-funded groups have convinced the consumer and real estate professionals that the only way to sell real estate is to engage with third party sites. Tom Hurdelbrink and his Board of Directors beg to differ. They believe that the real estate industry has what it takes to engage consumers with the listing content and market intelligence that has been cultivated by REALTORS® nationwide.

"What we really need is a tool that gives us a fighting chance to attract consumers and generate significant listing exposure and lead generation. Since more than half of all real estate traffic is now mobile, we need a strong position in the mobile space as well as desktop."

We came together with brokers and MLSs from around the country to rally around Homesnap – a nationwide REALTOR®-centric listing exposure and lead generation platform. Today, our listing agents have received thousands of free leads for the listings and customer relationships they have worked really hard to curate.

Bring Thousands of Free Leads to Your Subscribers!

Every BPP-participating MLS in the country is now delivering tons of leads to their members. MRED in Chicago, for example, has generated nearly 100,000 leads for its members since they launched the product a few years. In Chicago, online leads cost approximately $300 each from third party sources. BPP with Homesnap has helped MRED deliver nearly $300 million in lead value to its subscribers!

Learn More

If you are interested in learning more about how your MLS can participate in the Broker Public Portal with Homesnap, feel free to reach out to [email protected]. If you are a brokerage and would like to see if your MLS is offering this service, you can click here.

If you would like to watch a recorded webinar discussing BPP with Homesnap, you can click here.

If you would like to read this entire success story, you can download it here.

To view the original article, visit the WAV Group blog.