Today, ListTrac is unveiling what they call a “breakthrough,” and we call a potential game changer. Yes, that phrase is abused more than Axe body spray in a middle school hallway, but it applies. You see, they’re rolling out their new revenue model, which is a new revenue model of sorts for real estate professionals who will now be able to monetize their own listing content as it is distributed across the web.
“Just as musicians are compensated each time their song is played on the Internet, ListTrac wants real estate professionals to be rewarded every time their listing is viewed on the Internet,” said Trent Gardner, CEO of ListTrac.
Flipping the flow of money on its head
ListTrac calls themselves the “Google Analytics” of real estate listings, offering a free tool for Realtors to monitor their listing’s online performance across all real estate search sites, the MLS, and IDX feeds. They’ve partnered with many of the largest MLSs and offer listing metrics and reports to over 400,000 agents and monitor over 500K listings. And their next step is to put that data into a revenue stream for the real estate industry.
“For years, companies have taken listing content and assembled multi-billion dollar business models by monetizing the ‘eye-balls’ looking at this valuable content,” Gardner explains. “However, these business models don’t allow brokers to participate – so they have been sidelined watching others make millions of dollars in IPOs off of their content. ListTrac helps change that paradigm with a framework allowing real estate professionals to monitor and monetize their listing content.”
ListTrac is working with MLSs
In a statement, Gardner says the company went through “an arduous process meeting with MLS tech committees, syndication task forces and MLS boards – all populated with agents and brokers – to ensure that no personal information would be shared and that no MLS listing content would be licensed or sold.”
“ListTrac appealed to our leadership for two primary reasons; their commitment to security in guarding personal information and listings content, and their deep bench of analytics,” said James Harrison, CEO of MLSListings Inc. “The real estate professionals in our Silicon Valley marketplace are Google neighbors, so the bar for analytics is a high one. ListTrac and its growing list of participating portals gives our community what it needs to serve their clients,” said Harrison.
Why ListTrac will be the only player in this field
What fascinates us about ListTrac’s announcement is that it comes with real muscle – a U.S. Patent already awarded for not only the method of measuring and monetizing real estate listings, but the business process of sharing this revenue with the real estate professionals that are the content owners.
Said business process is known as “programmatic advertising,” and ListTrac will be working with MLS firms to monetize listing content, which they say “allows brands to reach consumers at the right time with the right product and the right message – better connecting the advertiser and the consumer.” ListTrac’s terms of use prohibits sharing of membership rosters, and no personally identifiable information about the consumer is not shared or sold.
The program is scheduled to be implemented by the end of this year and revenue generation is expected to begin in early 2016.
#ListTrac
Tara Steele is the News Director at The American Genius, covering entrepreneur, real estate, technology news and everything in between. If you'd like to reach Tara with a question, comment, press release or hot news tip, simply click the link below.
