This is super impressive. The only other company I can think of that might have more IDX feeds is Homes.com (via their relationship with RE/MAX)
These guys made a big splash at the NAR Annual Meetings in New Orleans with the announcement of $5.00 agent websites via a partnership with NAR.
(BTW: I asked Placester how many of these site they had sold and was told they wouldn’t release any of those numbers.)
I have to say their content marketing is the best in the business. Their Real Estate Marketing Academy is top notch. So well done and useful. I’d also recommend following Placester’s VP of Marketing Seth Price on Twitter. Seth is a smart guy and good at sharing some great tips from Placester and others.
But…
“”Because Placester places such emphasis on value to real estate professionals, about 90 percent of the MLSs it covers come with no surcharge…”
But their MLS directory has a bit more information. For instance when I click on the MRIS link I get this weird message.
“Placester believes that agents and brokers should not be charged to access their own data, and over time will work to lower costs for its customers.”
Well la-de-da. Pretty patronizing statement if you ask me. I’m not sure what they are trying to acomplish with this sort of attitude, some sort of public “shaming” an MLS provider for keeping costs under control?
Pretty lame considering Placester has received a over 23 Million dollars in funding, $15 million coming in just this past April in a series B round.
This attitude is something I see in a lot of new vendors in the real estate space. Especially those that are VC funded. They have sense of entitlement that they should be able to get any data they want, at any time, for no cost.
Some of the leadership in these new companies can’t seem to grapple the concept that just because they could download any song they wanted in college for free, doesn’t mean it was the right thing to do.
Greg, thanks for your comment. We have charges for data feeds to our members and because of that suffer this attitude from vendors. Back when we adopted the charges, the majority of MLSes did seem to bill for IDX. These vendors who are in our market tell our members that we are the minority or old school, etc. Ouch!
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Greg & Mike, I think the disclaimer that I wrote was not received as it was intended. Therefore, I’ve had it removed. Our goal is to reduce the costs and simplify the process of launching websites for real estate professionals across the board. We’ve worked successfully with 561 MLS’s over the past 4 years to increase coverage, simplify the on-boarding process and reduce direct costs to agents for getting IDX on their website. Some of that is by MLS’s enthusiastically reducing their fees and some of that is by Placester covering the IDX fee’s where it make economic sense. I won’t lie, I would ultimately like a scenario where there are no out of pocket fees for real estate professionals to get IDX listings on their sites. Right now we pass along surcharges for 65 of the 561 MLS’s that we cover. I can not pretend to understand the complexities of running an MLS but I do know from speaking to hundreds MLS and association executives, that they want to empower their agents to be successful online and off. We want to help facilitate that. All that said, That’s what I was attempting to convey in the disclaimer. Looks like I need to re-write the disclaimer. Thanks for the post and the comments.