Metrolist Selects Corelogic Matrix MLS System

“For more than 25 years, Metrolist developed and hosted its own proprietary MLS systems. “The pace of innovation has profoundly accelerated since the company was originally founded in 1984 and we found that a transition to a vendor-based product suite made a lot of sense,” commented Metrolist President and CEO, Kirby Slunaker. “We’re really here to empower our customers and help them drive their business success. Through this partnership with CoreLogic, we will be able to offer our customers a comprehensive set of tools that extend beyond the MLS platform and deliver on our service promise to Colorado Realtors®.”

This is old news of course, everyone knew Corelogic won the Metrolist contract. It appears their bundling strategy is working. When you have so many products to throw in with the deal it can make it difficult for other Vendors to compete. In a sense Matrix is the wheelbarrow that allows Corelogic to load up!

A few other things worth mentioning. The first, is what is not mentioned in the press release, Fusion. Pretty obvious that Fusion isn’t part of Corelogic’s long term future. Now you can see why Corelogic’s 30 million dollar acquisition of Tarasoft made sense. Can you imagine Corelogic without Matrix? Tempo and Fusion? Neither system will work both on an iPad or a Mac. Yuck.

The obvious thing here is the death of another “home grown” (I’m not sure I like this term, we should have something better) MLS system. Is this a trend? Yes, you can point to a quite a few “home grown” MLS systems that have converted to main stream MLS Vendors in the past several years. But you can also point to other MLS Providers who are “doing quite well thank you very much”. UtahRealEstate.com, and IRES MLS (just a bit down the road from Denver) just to mention a couple. RMLS in Portland also looks to be going strong despite their neighbor to the north, NWMLS (another Matrix account). So what’s the secret? How can some MLS providers thrive with their “home grown” MLS systems, and others cannot? Might be a good panel conversation for CMLS.

Despite all this, the facts remains clear, Corelogic’s strategy is working. Congrats to Ben and his team.

Update: David Charron reminds me of another “home grown” MLS provider, that is not only surviving but thriving, Annie Ives at TheMLS/CLAW.