Some of you may have seen Clareity Consulting’s recent white paper about the future of listing syndication. While we don’t agree with all points made in the paper, we value diverse perspectives in the industry discussion about syndication. However, there were a few incorrect references in the paper and we have been working with the Clareity Team to update the paper with correct information. The white paper is now updated with the following changes:

The original paper stated that ListHub sends listing content to publishers with express permission to use that data for the purpose of creating AVMs – this is not the case. ListHub’s data protections explicitly state that listing data fed from ListHub can only be used for consumer-display purposes. Publishers who display an AVM feature on their websites are noted on the ListHub Publisher Scorecards because some brokers may choose not to send listings to these sites. Also, in some markets a broker or agent can select the “No AVM” filter option when entering listing information into their MLS, and ListHub will automatically withhold those listings from publishers with an AVM feature. To be clear, your members’ listings are not used to create these valuation tools.

Second, the white paper stated that “about 80% of the MLSs (in the ListHub network) still require brokers to “opt out” of listing feeds to publishers with the default being to “select all publishers.” Actually, only about 30% of our MLS partners have chosen to send bulk feeds to one or more sites. Of course, even with a bulk feed in place, a broker always has the option to change the MLS default selections at any time. ListHub is 100% broker-controlled.

As your partner, we wanted to share these corrections with you directly. Accuracy matters, and we want to make sure that you and your members can have productive conversations about syndication based on facts. Thank you to Matt and Gregg for collaborating with us on this.