Today is a big day for Real Estate Webmasters:
The Global MLS project we have been working on is featured on the Cover of Real Estate Magazine
This project is something we’ve been working on since before covid however it was paused during the pandemic due to the lack of ability to travel and global uncertainty.
Now that borders are open again, we’re back at it! We’re building a global MLS!
The article explains a lot about how this came about and what we’re doing, but I would encourage you to ask questions here in this thread so that we have a place to discuss this exciting new project.
A few questions you might have right away:
Why are you building a global MLS? Most members here know Real Estate Webmasters build the world’s best real estate websites. They are at their best however when we have an IDX / MLS feed so we have access to available inventory as a call to action and can leverage listings for traffic and lead generation.
In the global markets there is no MLS (so there is no feed of listings) therefore when we land global customers, we are limited by just the listings they have in their office which (especially during times of low inventory) can be only a few (or none). This makes for a less-than-ideal consumer experience.
By having a global MLS we have far more listings to offer on any website, and thus no matter which customer website they land on, the user is happier as they don’t have to do to 5,000 different websites looking at 2 listings per brokerage.
Why are you building a public-facing portal? In order for brokerages to “want” to give us listings we need to have something of value to offer in return. By building a public-facing portal and investing in SEO / SEM for lead generation we are able to bring valuable traffic and leads to our partners.
The difference between us and Zillow or other global portals is we give the organic leads directly to the listing brokerage, free of charge, always. That is the value exchange. You give us your listings (so we can build our awesome MLS websites for our customers) and we’ll generate leads via the portal and send them to you free of charge.
Also ranking the portal gives us a centralized place to build traffic and exposure for the application.
Can North American REW customers send listings to the global MLS? Of course! North America is part of the world, right? We’re working with some of our larger customers right now to ingest their listings which we can do automatically since we manage their websites and listings.
Smaller customers can request indexing as well (feel free to post “I’m in” below) and we’re happy to add you to the list. Please note however in many areas, it likely must be the “broker” that approves the feed to REW, not the agent (listings belong to the office, not the individual).
How are you using AI on this portal? Lots of ways - starting with the creation of hyper valuable area pages, sub-pages, property type pages, and blog posts we’re using the process of “human-assisted AI” (which I just taught in LRE® in Florida) to create massively valuable content.
What about translations, is it multi-lingual? We can use AI for that too. But we also have browser translations, and we’re currently working with Google on leveraging their enterprise-level translations API to automatically translate the content into up to 133 languages.
How can I get involved in the global MLS? If you’re the broker, post your interest below. If you’re an agent, send this thread to your broker and encourage them to reach out.
Are there other lead-generation opportunities? Sure there are! While we give all the organic leads to the brokers (no charge), if an agent at a brokerage wanted to do some lead gen on those same listings, we would happily do PPC management for them and generate some paid leads. The value add here for the agent is they don’t have to buy a full platform from REW in order to use our PPC services (which is a huge cost savings), and the value add for the broker and the listing agent of course is even more exposure for their listings. You could have your lender kick in some PPC budget as well.
Do you require IDX paperwork? If you are a customer and we already have your listings imported into your website (in our listings management system) then no, we don’t need IDX paperwork. It is best though that if you’re not the “broker” that you still get permission to have us put these listings on the portal. If you are NOT our customer, then yes we’d need you to become a customer in most cases since you need to have your listings on a Real Estate Webmasters website (in North America) in order for us to ingest your listings for free.
What’s the timeline? We are in the listings gather phase right now (which will be ongoing) however we expect to start seeing organic rankings/traffic within 6 months.
Any questions? Let us know below 
