Thou shalt covet thy neighbor's listings

Internet companies have rolled out the red carpet for real estate listings and they're inviting brokers to the party for free. Free marketing exposure can be irresistible in today's suffering market conditions. (See "Brokers go all in with listings on the Web.")

Realtor.com, still the dominate player in online listings and still holding its cozy ties to the nation's Realtors, surely is paying attention to the ton of new beefy competitors that have moved into the neighborhood. The race to aggregate for-sale property listings online is in full swing.

In one corner, Zillow appears to be working feverishly to enable bulk listings uploads from brokers, announcing new deals set to send thousands of listings their way each day. Two of the deals have been reported in the last few weeks: one with ERA, and one with RE/MAX Allegiance.

In another corner, Trulia has been inking broker partnership deals for a couple of years and has partnered with such heavyweights as Realogy, Real Living and Realty Executives.

Cyberhomes is another online destination eyeing more listings via broker relationships.

And don't forget about Google Base. Many brokers have been sending listings there for exposure, including brokerage giant Realogy, which translates to about half a million listings for Google.

Enter Homescape in yet another corner. The online real estate venture, which is operated by a group of five newspaper publishers, has inked a new partnership with a real estate brokerage company to add more for-sale property listings to its online portal.

Homescape this summer announced a change in its approach, which used to rely on newspaper companies within its network to feed property listings in. The company now deals directly with brokers for listings.

What will differentiate these sites? Searching all of them sure sounds exhausting.

Now, about that DOJ lawsuit -- brokers are sending listings everywhere, yet this old rule that got NAR into trouble enables brokers to hold listings from competitors' Web sites. Might they be deeming their own sites useless as more decide to beef up national aggregators that offer a more comprehensive set of listings in many markets?

All rights reserved. This content may not be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever, in part or in whole, without written permission of Inman News. Use of this content without permission is a violation of federal copyright law.