Plan in the Works to Open Up New York Housing Market Via New Website
You wouldn’t have thought New York would be one of the last big cities to realize the frequest use of the Internet by potential mortgage loan applicants.
Nevertheless, the Big Apple is finally getting behind this big idea.
In a step toward opening up New York’s real estate marketplace, the Real Estate Board of New York announced yesterday that it plans to launch a public Internet portal containing all the exclusive apartment sales and rental listings of its 319 members, including the city’s biggest brokerages.
While similar systems exist in many housing markets around the country, establishing a comprehensive, shared, and free listing system on the Web has been a long, hard slog in New York City. Earlier attempts at cooperation among the city’s largest and most competitive real estate firms crashed and burned amid squabbling, reports the New York Sun.
Currently, home mortgage brokers with member firms must share information with one another about their exclusive listings within 72 hours, while about 10,000 to 15,000 sales and rental listings are available to brokers from member firms. The new portal, to be released early next year - with the fanfare of a seven-figure advertising budget - would offer these listings online to the public.
Benefits of Internet use: Potential buyers can now find most apartment listings online, scattered on a variety of Websites that belong to the firms, or in paid-for classifieds. In the proposed Web portal, the most comprehensive list available would be on one site. When a potential buyer clicks a listing, the buyer would be linked to the listing firm’s Website.
The president of the Real Estate Board of New York, Steven Spinola, said the system would make apartment shopping easier for hopeful buyers, while providing another marketing tool to mortgage brokers.
About 75% of buyers now consult the Internet before buying an apartment, according to real estate experts. Some national real estate search engines have appeared online recently, but they contain only a fraction of the New York City listings that are controlled by members of the Real Estate Board.
Some of the city’s largest firms, such as the Corcoran Group and Prudential Douglas Elliman, have been reluctant to share all of their exclusive listings with the search engines, like Trulia or Street Easy.
A few insiders say that it’s not immediately clear what large real estate firms would gain by sharing their listings alongside the listings of smaller firms. But that’s of no matter to the typical consumer that simply wants to compare listings.
He or she will soon have the chance to from the comfort of his/her own living room.