Recently, I heard the National Association of REALTORS® CEO, Dale Stinton, make a comparison between realtor.com vs. Zillow and Trulia.

And I don’t know if he could’ve made any better sense of it as he explained it like this:

realtor.com is PBS television—accurate and truthful.

Zillow and Trulia are The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills—nothing but drama and inaccuracies.

My take on it was that he meant it in terms of boring vs. not-so-boring. The realtor.com website (yes, it is lowercase for a reason) may not be presented in an engaging, flashy, or train-wreck kind of way, but the data you get is accurate and reliable. If you watch it close enough, it can get real interesting.

Meanwhile, Zillow and Trulia have the drama of sex, lies, exaggerations, and unreliability. It’s the train wreck you just can’t look away from. However, just like TV ratings, web traffic to these sites is way higher than it is to the PBS-like realtor.com.

If you prefer quality over quantity, then realtor.com is where you want your clients to be.

Whether or not you agree, we can probably all agree on one thing—the drama of inaccuracies on Zillow’s “Zestimates.” Combating those inaccuracies when sitting at the table with your client, trying to explain that their house isn’t worth what Zillow (or Trulia) says it is, can be frustrating.

At GSBOR, we get a lot of calls from members demanding to know why our MLS data is being given to Zillow, Trulia, or any other real estate site. For the record, it is not GSBOR or Springfield MLS pushing your data to these sites—we are simply providing the vehicle for it.

It’s tough to please everyone. Many brokers want the option to push their listings to popular real estate sites because they know that 89% of all home searches start on the internet. They want maximum exposure for their listings, and these high-traffic sites offer that. The goal is to go where the people are and attract buyers.

But, we also have brokers who do not want their listings to go to these sites.

I don’t blame them. There are some shady websites out there that capture buyer contact data and then try to sell the lead to brokers and agents for a huge referral percentage fee. Ugh! It’s crazy.

To meet our members’ needs, GSBOR/Springfield MLS has found a middle ground. Under the direction of the MLS Board of Directors, we contracted with Point 2 Syndication to allow some, but not all, MLS data to be syndicated to various real estate websites. Point 2 ensures that the data is syndicated only to quality websites.

The control is in the hands of the broker.

Each broker (MLS participant/subscriber) has a dashboard where they can select which sites they want to syndicate their listings to—it’s as simple as checking a box. Brokers have complete control over their syndicated data.

I’ve gone off on a bit of a tangent about data syndication, and I’ll cover that in more depth in future posts. If you want to keep all posts on this topic in line, just click on the “Syndication” category in the right-hand column of this website.

Getting back to the differences between PBS and The Real Housewives…

If accurate data is what you’re seeking, go to realtor.com. There are several changes coming down the pipeline for this website—so much so that the National Association of REALTORS® has called a Special Meeting with their Board of Directors to discuss these changes. That meeting takes place at the end of July, and GSBOR is fortunate to have one of our local members serving as a national director. That means the information we receive will be accurate.

If you’ve read this entire post, you may have opened a few other cans of worms in your mind—like the possibility of a National MLS or the fact that NAR doesn’t actually own 100% of realtor.com (true story). There may also be regulatory issues surrounding syndication that need to be examined.

These are all topics we’ll address, so stay tuned.

In the meantime, don’t throw a table at me or anything—Real Housewives drama style, of course. I’m just the messenger, and I promise to keep you posted.

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This post was originally published on June 23, 2013 on www.springfieldaereport.com which is no longer active.