ListHub will stop supplying listings data that it aggregates from more than 560 multiple listing services to Trulia next week, having terminated its syndication agreement with the nation’s second most visited real estate search portal in the wake of its acquisition by Zillow.
ListHub — which is owned by realtor.com operator Move Inc., a News Corp. subsidiary — was already on track to stop supplying listings to Zillow in April. Zillow announced in January that it had been unable to come to terms with News Corp. over renewing its syndication agreement with ListHub, and would be seeking to obtain more listings directly from brokers and MLSs.
Today’s announcement by ListHub — which Zillow Group spokeswoman Katie Curnutte characterized as “sudden and unilateral” — puts Trulia in the same boat. ListHub-sourced listings will no longer appear on Trulia.com as of Feb. 26.
“This action is a result of the completion of Zillow’s acquisition of Trulia this week, and the upcoming dissolution of ListHub’s syndication relationship with Zillow this April,” said ListHub General Manager Celeste Starchild in a statement.
Speaking on Zillow’s behalf, Curnutte said the decision “underscores what we’ve been saying all along — it’s critical for multiple listings services and Realtor association boards to work directly with the largest real estate websites, like Zillow and Trulia, to ensure their sellers’ listings can be seen by the largest audience of homebuyers.”
MLSs, Curnutte said, “should not outsource something as important as the online marketing of their members’ listings (and the millions of sellers they represent) to third-party intermediaries like News Corp.”
Although Zillow says it gets most of its listings from other sources, it’s been scrambling to sign direct-feed agreements with MLSs and brokers in an effort to avoid losing access to information on hundreds of thousands of listings when the ListHub agreement ends.
At this time, it is unclear how many listings ListHub will be pulling from Trulia.
ListHub will continue to provide listings to 158 “industry-friendly” websites for the more than 80,000 brokers it serves nationwide, Starchild said.
“ListHub also will be focused on driving the interoperability of leading technology solutions, and on providing the industry’s most complete and actionable metrics about listing performance,” she said.
In a letter to its MLS customers, ListHub said it would continue to accept analytics in order to provide reporting for the Zillow network in the ListHub consolidated dashboard with all other publisher sites.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated.
Questions or comments? Email Andrea V. Brambila.