For years brokers in the New York metro area have longed for a multiple listings service. And now it’s launching 42,000 subscribers deep.
Realtors in Westchester and Long Island last year agreed to merge their systems into the New York MLS, which they’ve now renamed “OneKey,” they said Thursday. The platform currently has 47,000 listings stretching from the Catskills to Montauk, including the five boroughs of New York City, one of the only major U.S. cities without a centralized MLS.
“When we partnered with the Long Island Board of Realtors, we set out to expand the size and scale of an MLS to create greater opportunities for our members,” Richard Haggerty, president of OneKey MLS and CEO of Hudson Gateway Association of Realtors said in a statement Thursday.
Public clashes between brokerage firms and StreetEasy over the past two years have renewed calls for a single listings platform. The Real Estate Board of New York syndicated its RLS last year, but StreetEasy does not accept its feed. The RLS later tightened rules for data-sharing procedures and introduced fines for violators amid calls for better data.
Still, Haggerty said the RLS is not a true MLS because it’s a back-office system with front-end plug-ins. (Efforts to make the RLS public facing have not come to fruition.)
“We’ve talked to about every major firm in the city,” Haggerty said in an interview. “From our perspective, if agents have to go to multiple data sources to complete a comparative market analysis, that’s time and money.”
In a statement, REBNY defended its system, which it referred to as “the only definitive source of listings data for the industry by the industry.”
Since February, several New York firms have started using OneKey, including Compass, Bond and Keller Williams, he said.
Still, a cursory look at the public-facing version of the system shows it has a long way to go. It currently has 1,541 active sales listings in Manhattan. By comparison, there are 8,489 listings in Manhattan on StreetEasy.
According to Haggerty, OneKey will cost $2,200 per year per office, with agents paying $110 per year. Right now, there will be no listing fee. “It’s a question of who’s going to have the best source of data, the most accurate data,” Haggerty said.