Estate Agent searches fade into obscurity
Using Google’s helpful trend analysis tool, it is easy to spot the point in time when the property portal Rightmove had achieved the critical mass to push past the number of searches performed for “Estate Agent”. This is a good example of the shift in the collective mentality of house buyers from thinking about a specific Estate Agent, but rather thinking about the clearinghouse of properties that a portal can provide.
UK vs. USA
The UK property market has not evolved with the benefit (or is it detriment?) of local multiple listing services (MLSs). In the 1960’s the Real Estate agents in the USA began to split their sales commissions for each transaction and the buyers agent would be compensated with 3% of the sales price and the sellers agent would also be compensated with 3% of the sales price.
The split commission structure encouraged an open exchange of listing information between all of the agents and soon MLSs began to start in local areas as a way to manage the transfer of information. Before everyone had a PC, the MLSs published books for agents to subscribe to. The books would come once a week or at regular intervals. Once PCs became mainstream, and the MLSs published the information electronically and each agent would subscribe to access the listings database. There are currently over 900 local MLSs in the USA.
National MLS
Back to my point about Rightmove. It is easy to draw a parallel to Rightmove as a national MLS for the UK. The market share is not quite 100% but it does dominate the competition. The interesting thing about the Rightmove property portal model is that it has achieved its success through the traffic was driven by the public’s demand for the information, whereas the local MLS’s in the USA were set up by Real Estate Agents to benefit Real Estate Agents and are for the most part closed to consumers.
The consumer driven model in the UK is a superior system for publishing property information and it is unfortunate that the majority of the MLSs in the USA have been refusing to open there listing to the public. Some are slowly beginning to adapt and allow public access, but the rest should hurry because the large brokers are now starting to push their listing towards Trulia and other “portal-ish” websites.
Now only if Estate Agents in the UK began to split their commissions and share their listings with competing agents, they would have the most efficient real estate system in the world,…. but that is an entirely different post