Weaving webs in online property hunting

By Alison Gregor

While brokers and real estate firms have struggled for years to create a multiple-listing service as a one-stop destination for citywide property listings -- something which exists in almost every other American city -- no such animal is likely to soon thrive in Manhattan, say market experts.

Enter spiders, which are Internet search engines designed to collect real estate listings from other sites. Services including Propertyrover.com, Cribseek.com, and Natefind.com allow users to see listings from many brokerages at once instead of having to search multiple sites.

"The problem in New York City is pretty well-known," said Natefind.com owner Nate Friedman. "I was just trying to make it easier for people to find listings. Instead of having to go to 20 different places, they only have to go to one."

The spiders have been positively received by brokerages so far. However, when Century 21 Kevin B. Brown & Associates in October launched a link on the company's Web site that then opened a pop-up window listing all of New York's major brokerages, it ruffled a few feathers.

Using a spider, a user inputs criteria into a Web page -- for example, studio apartments listed for under $500,000 in Chelsea -- and a search engine scrapes listings meeting that criteria off other sites. The listings are presented as a series of links on the spider's Web page.

The most recent spider to crawl into the fray is Cribseek.com, which searches by New York, Connecticut or New Jersey zip code and which opened to the public in October. It has designs on other geographic locations.

"We're a search engine, but we're a very specific search engine," Cribseek.com's owner Howard Yen said. "We're there to crawl any real estate listings, brokerages, classified ads, and then we redirect the traffic to those sites."

Cribseek.com is similar to a spider called Trulia.com, which currently assists those looking for homes in California.

The New York-centric Natefind.com, which launched last spring for the general public's use, currently searches about 20 different Web sites for listings by street, neighborhood or borough. Friedman said his goal is to help the public consolidate real estate data from a multitude of Internet locations.

There is also a system called Manhattan MLS, which was launched in 2002 by the Manhattan Association of Realtors, but many large brokerages still don't participate.

Laura Rubinfeld, executive officer of MANAR, said the group's members formed the MLS so they could co-broker properties in an orderly fashion. They also wanted to market their listings on Realtor.com, a site owned by the National Association of Realtors.

Rubinfeld said the Manhattan MLS sets itself apart from other services, like spiders, by requiring that brokerages enter expiration dates for listings and sales prices upon closing. That means the data can be used by brokers to help get pricing information from comparable properties. This is information that other Manhattan brokerages consider to be proprietary. Will Manhattan MLS eventually drive spiders to the brink of extinction?

"I don't know," Rubinfeld said. "It depends on whether the market grabs onto the MLS."

So far the jury is out. Besides the aforementioned spiders, a couple of private enterprises offer listing aggregators, such as BrokersNYC and OLR. These are services that brokerages can subscribe to, providing their listings and then viewing the listings of other broker subscribers.

But the major internal, proprietary system brokers use is R.O.L.E.X., which distributes listings between firms and is backed by the brokerage behemoths in Manhattan and owned by the powerful Real Estate Board of New York.

As part of a political skirmish in the brokerage community, R.O.L.E.X. was set up last year to be compatible with the OLR system but not with BrokersNYC, whose founder Lala Wang sued the Real Estate Board. The suit remains unresolved.

All this fragmentation among brokerages intent on guarding their listing information has led to the proliferation of Internet spiders.

"There isn't an MLS, and many brokerages try to hoard their information, and that's just not good for the marketplace," Friedman said. "People are going to try to break down those barriers continually with spiders and whatnot."

The first spiders came about to assist brokers. In the absence of a thriving MLS, PropertyRover.com was launched two years ago to help Manhattan brokers by scraping listings from a growing number of Web sites that currently totals about 160, said co-founder Laurence Ross. Recently, the company launched a Brooklyn page.

But Ross said the importance of this information to consumers has become evident.

"We are in discussions to do a consumer version of this," he said.

There are issues about which services are set up to best serve users, and which users are primary. For instance, some spiders capture duplicate listings. That can be tedious for the consumer, but essential for competing brokers hoping to reach the consumer.

The owners of spiders say they have received few, if any, objections from the brokerages whose listings databases they are currently crawling.

"I was expecting complaints, and that's why I had been treading so lightly in the marketplace," said Friedman, who hasn't publicized his spider. "But I've gotten a lot of interest from brokerages, some large, that are not currently being spidered, and they've asked to be included."
A proto-spider tangles its web
But brokerages are a bit more sensitive if one of their own tries to tear down technological divides. The Kevin B. Brown incident is a case in point: The link on its Web site then opened a pop-up window listing all of New York's major brokerages. If one clicked on the Corcoran Group, it led to that company's listings search page.

Kevin Brown, chairman of the firm, said the move was a sort of virtual "Miracle on 34th Street" on the company's part.

"You remember that movie: Macy's, if it didn't have something, they sent you over to Gimbel's," he said. "Well, this was the 'Miracle on 57th Street,' and we've gotten a great response with it."

Some competing firms were not charmed.

"I acknowledge that what he was doing is legal," said Frederick Peters, president of Warburg Realty. "Yet the idea that he would be advertising my listings and urging customers to use his agents to buy them, it seems inevitable that wouldn't make me happy."

Hall F. Willkie, president of Brown Harris Stevens, said he was not familiar with the term "spider," but after receiving an explanation, said he didn't think the service would be a problem. After all, the firm's brokers take advantage of PropertyRover.com all the time, he said.

But the expropriation of Brown Harris Stevens' Web site by Century 21 Kevin B. Brown & Associates was another story.

"On our Web site is a 'terms and conditions of use' that says you can't use any part of this without permission," he said. "And as a firm, we don't want to be on Century 21's Web site. That would be like in the retail world, if you clicked on K-Mart and came up with Bergdorf's, or Bloomingdale's and came up with Macy's."

Brown has removed his portal to major firms' search engines and, as of Nov. 12, had instead replaced it with a portal to a Web page that has a link to the Real Estate Board of New York's membership page.

"I gather the resentment is that people will be on my site too long and get too comfortable with the idea," Brown said. "Right now, I'm the mouse that roared, and I may be the spider that got squashed."

The portal on Century 21 Kevin B. Brown & Associates' Web page is not a spider. But Brown said that, in the absence of a universal New York MLS, he has designs on his own spider if he can find a cost-effective way to implement it. "If I can figure out a way to do it easily, whether it's with PropertyRover.com or on my own, I am going to do a spider," he said. "But, for now, I think I've made my point, which was opening up the information flow to the consumer."

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