HomeServices of America and Keller Williams are among the first major brokerage enterprises to activate Cotality’s new Broker Listing Exchange, or BLX, a listing-management platform designed to help brokerages manage listing data before distributing it to MLSs, portals and other partners.
But CEO Chris Kelly says the Cotality-built system also reflects a broader shift in how large brokerages are thinking about listing data, distribution and control.
In an interview with Inman, Kelly said the traditional model — entering listing data into local MLS systems first, then receiving aggregated feeds back for brokerage websites and other tools — has become “backwards.” Instead, he said, HomeServices wants listing data to start inside its own system before being distributed downstream.
Kelly emphasized that BLX is not intended to bypass MLSs or serve as a private-listing network. But he also described the platform as a hedge against an increasingly fragmented data landscape, where MLSs, portals and brokerages are each making strategic decisions to protect their own interests.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Inman: The launch materials describe the industry’s current listing-data process as fundamentally backwards. What do you mean by that?
Chris Kelly: Historically, we would enter our listing data into the MLS, and then we would get a feed of that aggregated data, along with IDX and other listings, to then populate our websites or populate any other applications that we would be using.
That’s opposed to putting all of that data into our own spot first and then sending it over to chosen destinations.
So when I say backwards, what I mean is this idea of piecemealing it into somebody else’s system and then getting the aggregated version of it back to us.
Historically, it’s been fine. This is the way the system was set up, but I don’t think the system was set up specifically to have it done that way. We have these things in place for decades at this point, and every once in a while, you have to pause and ask: Does it make sense anymore to do it this way?
When we stop and think about it, we don’t think it makes sense to do it that way anymore.
Why now? And why Cotality?
Kelly: The “why now” is that there is so much changing. If anyone tells you exactly what the landscape is going to look like a year from now, they’re guessing at best.
This isn’t a play where I see for certain that this is the way MLSs and data distribution are going to be positioned a year from now or three years from now. It’s actually a play that says: I don’t know exactly where it’s going to be a year from now or three years from now. I know it’s going to be different.
So now is when we need to put our data into our own spot and then decide where to distribute it from there.
That could mean a year from now, distributing it in the exact same places that we do today. But you’re seeing MLSs right now — as we’ve seen over the past couple of weeks with MRED and others — they’re all kind of doing their own thing, and it’s all shifting very quickly.
It became very apparent to us that because these things are changing, we need to have control of our information first. Then, regardless of how things change in the landscape, we’re in a position to evolve with it much easier than the decentralized and very bifurcated way that it’s done right now, where for us specifically, we’re entering this content separately, listing by listing, into 243 MLSs.
As for Cotality, it is a Cotality product. When we thought about whether to build it ourselves or partner with somebody, we didn’t see the need to necessarily build this internally. With a partner like Cotality, they have a product they can build much quicker. Cotality has the CoreLogic product for about 100 of the 450 MLSs across the country. Of our 240-plus MLSs that we’re part of, about 50 of those are CoreLogic.
Is BLX a response to MRED and other MLSs pursuing broader national listing strategies?
Kelly: We were in development on this well before that announcement came out.
To me, it reinforces the reason we’re doing it. It’s not the catalyst for it, but once that happened, we all looked at each other and said: This is one of the reasons we’re doing this.
This is phase one of who knows how many phases of this landscape shifting — the way the portals are getting business, the way MLSs are doing business.
Fundamentally, we need to make sure that we have all of our stuff in one place, and then we control the distribution up and from there.
Is there any private-listing or delayed-marketing component to BLX?
Kelly: No. It is not a primary driver.
One of the other use cases for it is, as we are doing the Zillow Preview program for coming-soon listings, one of the challenges we face is getting a singular feed of those listings over to Zillow that doesn’t have to be manually done.
So that’s an example of some pre-marketing that helps. But this is not a precursor to having a PLN.
Now, if the world exploded tomorrow on that front and these aggregators — whether MLSs or whatever — all went away or changed dramatically, and as a brokerage, you had to have a distribution channel of your own, having something like this at least makes us prepared for that.
But that is not the preemptive reason we would be doing it.
Broker leaders, including Hoby Hanna and Robert Reffkin, have talked about brokerages needing more control over listings and listing data. Is BLX part of that same philosophical shift?
Kelly: I think there’s a lot of alignment across different industry players around the idea of control.
Control doesn’t necessarily mean ownership. I don’t think I’ve ever had a question over who owns our data. That’s been spelled out in MLS agreements and participant agreements, and when you give it to portals and everything else like that, or even with photographers when they take photos.
So I’m less concerned about the ownership side of it. But it is about control. Not control in a way that says, “I want to close it in and hold it close to my chest and away from others,” but in a way that says there are a lot of cooks in the kitchen right now on listing content aggregation and listing content distribution.
At the fundamental level, for all the hard work that our agents and brokerages do to accumulate that — the sweat and tears that go into just getting a listing, and then that listing becomes photos and content and other IP — our thought is that, at a fundamental level, we should have our hands around that.
From there, we partner with the partners that make sense, whether that’s portals, MLSs or whatever it may be. But in order to partner effectively with them, we think we need to have our hands around all of this information first.
Right now, it is shotgunned out into the world, into all these different MLSs and different portals. Then you have a whole world of secondary applications as well that dice the information for you and extract insights. We feel like we should have all that stuff first, as opposed to putting it out into the world shotgun fashion, then getting it back and assembling it like a puzzle on the back side.
That’s the part where we say it’s been backwards. And I think a lot of brokerages across the country probably feel the same.
Beyond reducing duplicate entry, what value does HomeServices expect to get from centralizing listing data?
Kelly: We have some markets where our agents and brokerages belong to multiple MLSs, and oftentimes that requires dual entry. Going this route allows us to enter the information once, and then it distributes out into multiple MLSs. That’s a surface-level problem, but it’s real if you ask our agents about entering into dual markets.
Then, obviously, MLS consolidation continues to happen. Having our data in one place allows us to adapt to that world much more quickly as those things happen.
The insights are part of it as well. The ability to look into our HomeServices data, brokerage by brokerage, market by market, and see what’s happening with our listing content allows us to have much better insights and forecasting on what’s happening in the market.
Which markets are driving more price adjustments? Where are properties sitting for longer? Where are the hot markets? When you have that kind of information in real time, it allows you to be much more responsive to your agents and to the consumers with those insights.
The launch materials mention AI-readiness. What does that mean in practical terms?
Kelly: For us and the partner we selected, they have been a longtime leader in the data analytics world. You and I both know that sometimes you just say “AI,” and it’s supposed to be magical. It just happens.
For us, really, it’s about speed to market. It’s taking a data analytics partner, and when you layer smartly deployed AI on top of that data, it gives you insights that much faster. It gives you the analytics that you need to determine what’s going on in a way that has sometimes been a very manual process.
We’ve had listing data for decades at this point, but it’s so much information that it can be difficult for someone to just sit around and crunch the numbers. You can do it, but by the time you’ve done it, you’re three months down the road and into the next quarter. For us, it’s really the speed to insight and the speed of knowledge that comes with layering AI on top of some of the analytics that will come from this.
You’ve said this is not an anti-MLS move. But how do you think about that at a moment when MLSs themselves are making independent decisions about their futures?
Kelly: Our position over this last conversation has been that there are times, as there have been for decades, where a more limited exposure to a listing makes sense. But we believe the vast majority of the time, the listing deserves the maximum exposure. Under the system we have right now, putting the property into the MLS provides that level of exposure, and that is not a system we are seeking to undermine.
What we’re seeing, though, ever since this changing landscape over the past three years and the increased antitrust concerns, is that everyone is kind of looking out for themselves. We didn’t get a letter from an MLS saying, “Hey, we’re about to go national. Are you guys good with that?”
These MLSs are making independent decisions based on what they think is best for them in their particular markets, and they’re not necessarily putting it up for a vote of all participants. I can’t control what they’re going to do. And it’s clear I don’t think we’re done with this world yet. We’ve seen three in the last two weeks say they’re going to go national and take a national feed. There’s more coming, and bigger MLSs will get into the fold.
So this is really just a hedge. We need to be doing this anyway. But what is happening with MLSs right now — looking out for themselves and determining where they are going to be relevant in the future state of the real estate industry — is where we feel something like this is going to be very important.
Is that regulatory pressure part of the equation, too?
Kelly: There are a lot of reactionary things happening. This is an attempt for us to be proactive in a world that has been very reactionary over the past 12 months, where everything seems to be a knee-jerk reaction to the last knee-jerk decision, and that creates another knee-jerk decision.
What we’re trying to do is position ourselves so that we’re not reactive. We’re not forced to make a knee-jerk reaction to something. We’re in a position of being proactive, so that as this landscape changes, whatever may come, we’re in a position to take advantage of it.
Once compensation got pulled out of the MLS, what we said publicly was that I think this is freeing to an MLS. The fact that you no longer have to govern compensation between brokerages, and you don’t have to get into the muck of how you do your business from a regulatory standpoint, means you can focus on being a really good data aggregator and data distributor.
That should be freeing to MLSs. Some of them are really embracing that world. I think others will struggle to embrace what it means to be a really high-end technology partner for the brokerage world, as opposed to the regulatory body that MLSs have found themselves as in the past.