Inside National Real Estate Online News: AOL Real Estate To Use Real Estate Content from Zillow

I awoke this morning to word that AOL Real estate and Move.com, the Westlake, CA-based company that operates web sites and blogs for the National Association of Realtors, have severed an almost three-year contract in which Move.com provided real estate content for the AOL Real Estate consumer site from about 425 MLS’s.

In the wild world of national Real Estate, there are more than 800 multiple listing services very much like the one that operates here in North Texas, MetroTex. Each one is a separate company. There is chatter about merging MLS’s, and indeed I believe this has happened in California. There is also chatter about MLS’s giving consumers a way to gauge agents, a ratings system of sorts that will surpass and improve on existing systems, such as costly print ad campaigns.

Move is experimenting with an agent-ranking platform, AgentMatch, that lets users search for agents using actual production statistics: number of listings and sales in the city, ZIP code, or neighborhood of specialty.

Move has provided listings data to AOL Real Estate through its syndication platform, ListHub, since August 2011. It’ data is considered by many to be the most accurate in the business because it comes directly from the individual MLS’s.

But CandysDirt.com has learned that AOL Real Estate will be using listings data from Zillow, with the announcement coming in the next few days.

AOL Real Estate was once a serious journalism venture — I know, I was a part of it. Lately it seems to be more aggregation than fresh reporting, but what else is new, welcome to the new age of journalism. We continue to consume it daily.

In any case, from what I hear the Move move was pretty mutual and Move is planning to expand it’s reach to consumers through more marketing campaigns with NAR. Realtor.com is fighting both Zillow and Trulia for Web market share. According to Experian Marketing Services data, both sites are nipping in on Realtor.com’s heels. The site boasts more more than 24 million monthly visitors. Last summer, NAR amended it’s operating agreement with Move to allow non-NAR affiliated sources to share listing info on Move.com, and New York City-based The Corcoran Group jumped right in.

Source: Experian Marketing Services

Yep, we love House Porn: the top online real estate sites hogged 38.99% of ALL desktop computer traffic in October, 2013, says Experian.