It was ironic not long ago when Real Estate Webmasters CEO Morgan Carey decided to buy a property in Lisbon, Portugal. Working from his home country of Canada, Carey had all kinds of issues accessing what was on the market, with language barriers and scant Multiple Listing Service (MLS) options. It totally justified his decision to help create an international MLS portal that is set to debut in January.
The genesis of the portal came about a couple of years ago, and while Real Estate Webmasters would ultimately be responsible for building it, the idea was conceptualized by several tech-savvy real estate executives.
“Paul Boomsma of Leading Real Estate Companies of the World® asked me if I would come overseas and bring our products to his international members,” recalls Carey. “Then, Michael Polzler, CEO of RE/MAX Europe, helped educate me on the lack of broker cooperation in the vast majority of countries. It was actually Michael who suggested we build a global listings system.”
A potential roadblock for a global portal would be all the different languages, but Carey says it turned out not to be an issue.
“One of our challenges,” he admits, “was ‘do we want to deal with multilingual?’ And what we discovered is that most of the brokers in other countries we want to do business with don’t care about that, because most everyone speaks English.
“From a technology perspective, if you’ve ever been to a country where a different language is spoken, Google Chrome or whatever you’re using just pops up a translator for you, so we’re way past needing to have individually translated listings,” explains Carey. “Technology has made it where that’s not necessary anymore.”
While Carey notes that Real Estate Webmasters’ products work best when there’s a large feed of listings available to populate its customers’ websites, with no global MLS—and thus, no listing feeds—the first step in going global is to have access to the MLS. And since there isn’t one, Real Estate Webmasters is building it.
Carey has no worries over filling the new portal with listings, as there will be no charge to brokers.
“We need them to want to give us their listings,” he says. “If there’s one thing brokers and agents will never say no to, it’s leads. Since we’re the best SEO company in the world that does real estate websites, we figured why not build out a portal on the front end and use our SEO skills to generate leads for our brokers? They get what they want (all the organic leads), and we get what we want (a big feed of listings that we can now build websites on). The promise for all organic leads is that your listings are your leads, free of charge. We won’t sell them back to you. They’re yours.”
Outside of North America, Carey will be selling websites built by Real Estate Webmasters, with the competitive advantage of the global MLS feed in order to generate income.
“Within North America, where we already have IDX, we make money by selling paid ads to lenders and other ancillary services,” says Carey.
“We’re currently only working with large foreign brokerages and franchises who can provide ‘feeds,’ but soon, agents will be able to add their listings directly as well. If anyone wants to send us listings, I’d be happy to put them in touch with our technical team,” concludes Carey.
For more information, visit https://www.realestatewebmasters.com.
