John Reilly, director of RealTown, and I have been around Internet listing display and listing data distribution since their inception. Based on what we’ve learned over the last 19 years, and more recently over the last five years, we believe there is room for different “public portal real estate models.”
It is our firm and unmoving belief that if there was ever a time for the industry to “take back its future,” that time is now, especially with last month’s NAR Board of Directors meeting in Chicago, the last of which took place on August 26, 1996, when the NAR Directors decided to turn over realtor.com® to Stuart Wolfe, et al. What you see of realtor.com® and the Web landscape today is in large part a result of decisions made in 1996. But NAR and realtor.com® are not the only solutions to the data concerns of industry stakeholders today. World-class, public MLS and association portals, not reliant upon dues for operation, can be influential as we move forward.
Based in part on the timing of the latest NAR conversations around MLS public portals and core, basic and optional services, Point2 set out to create a no-cost portal solution for MLSs/associations that provides: