Zillow just royally screwed REX Homes.
Zillow recently made a switch to an IDX feed, to consolidate the thousands of MLS’s they were integrating with.
www.REXhomes.com is not a member of any MLS, nor do their sellers offer the buyer agent any commission. As a consequence, their listings are only displayed on Zillow and Trulia who built a custom bridge to accept their feed, Realtor.com and Redfin do not.
Zillow’s format has changed, they’ve created two tabs: “Agent listings” and “Other listings”, comprised of pre-foreclosures, auctions — auto-fed public records that aren’t for sale, and for-sale-by-owners and REX’s listings. In essence, REX now has less exposure within the only exposure their listings had.
The first thing sellers do when their home’s listing goes live is look it up online. Their clients are not going to be happy about this. This will genuinely make it harder for them to sell their listings. If I REX, I would join an anti-MLS-MLS, like www.mystatemls.com, who is neither owned nor affiliated with the National Association of Realtors. They would enable REX to offer a nominal buyer-agent commission of a dollar, staying true to their value prop. This move would file their listings under the appropriate “Agent listings” tab, and would even get their listings syndicated out to Realtor.com as well.
One would think, REX, backed by nearly a hundred million in private funding, will do something about this, but haven’t we all seen firms with even more funding make strange choices until the day they die? I am rooting for this company as I believe they will be on the right side of history, written by anti-trust officials and attorneys currently working to see to it that buyer-agents cannot legally receive compensation from anyone other than their buyer.
