Vendor Wars Heating Up in NYC

With Perchwell entering the market, Douglas Elliman signing a long-term agreement with Bridge Interactive to build a new listing platform, and Nestio raising a new financing round, we that thought it would be interesting to see how the city’s veterans are holding up. The short answer: pretty good!

New York City is one of the largest real estate markets in the world. However, it is one of the only U.S. markets not to have its own Multiple Listing Platform (MLS). While there are a couple companies working hard to fill that gap in the future, The Real Estate Board of New York (REBNY) has been the de facto MLS for New York City. While MLSs typically operate with a single listing management system, the most common being CoreLogic’s Matrix, REBNY has taken a different approach, and has a list of approved vendors through which you can upload and download listings. Some of those vendors have been around for a really long time, such as RealPlus, OLR, and RealtyMX – each with its own strengths and weaknesses, but over the past few years we’ve seen a wave of new entrants, including Nestio, and more recently, Perchwell. Given recent changes, we thought that it would be a great opportunity to look at how these new vendors are performing compared with their veteran peers.

 

 

The first thing we explored is the market share of each vendor from a listing count perspective. This includes all exclusive sale and rental listings that were made public and distributed. If a listing was never shared publicly, which is rare, but can happen, it was not included in our research. Our research shows that the veteran vendors fare pretty well, and have successfully maintained or grown their share of listings under management. At the same time, we see new entrants Nestio and Perchwell successfully capturing market share, suggesting that as the market grows in total listing volume, there’s enough room for them to carve out a niche. Perchwell has successfully won over some big-name clients such as Sotheby’s, Core, and Warburg (MetaProp founder and Warburg President Clelia Peters is one of the firm’s supporters), and Nestio is helping key property managers, such as Rudin and Moinian manage and market their rentals.

 

 

We also explored the market share of each vendor from a listing volume perspective, measured in dollars. This, again, includes all exclusive sale and rental listings that were made public and distributed, and if a listing was never shared publicly, it was not included in our research. The story here is roughly similar. However, here we see a major shift in volume from RealPlus to Perchwell, which reflects the loss of the previously mentioned large clients in recent years. Also visible is the low dollar value of RealtyMX and Nestio listings as a result of their focus, primarily, on rental listings.

With the market seemingly peaking in 2017, and heading towards a likely continued downturn, it will be interesting to see how these vendors fare. While Perchwell has been able to win over large firms from incumbent RealPlus, we haven’t seen similar major shifts away from OLR. Similarly, we have yet to see any major wins from Nestio recently, but given their recent fundraise, led by Camber Creek and Trinity Ventures, it’s likely that we’ll see some interesting news from them in the future.

 

Source: Cherre Research