NCREX and Quattro are here. Is it to little to late?

At the end of last year in my post “MLS in Turmoil” I wrote about rush to consolidation in the San Francisco Bay Area caused by enthusiastic reply of clients to services from Trulia and Zillow. Just this week one of the two efforts I mentioned then – NCREX – came to fruition.

I said at that time that:

“Within a few months, we will most likely be able to receive all real estate data in Northern California from 2 sources, NCREX and Quattro. Quattro is a new MLS data-sharing initiative among San Francisco Association of Realtors (SFAR), Bay Area Real Estate Information Services Inc. (BAREIS) in the North Bay and MetroList in the Sacramento area. Northern California Real Estate eXchange (NCREX) "is in the effort to explore how to consolidate the MLS operations across the region to better serve their subscribers needs". Local MLS organizations who initially founded NCREX included RE Infolink, Contra Costa MLS, East Bay Regional Data (EBRD), Central Valley MLS and SFAR.. SFAR switched alliance to Quattro on September 25, 2006.

Quattro “happened” very quickly, still in March/April this year. According to the involved parties, it is fairly informal effort off involved MLS solidified merely “by a handshake” between involved MLSs.  It is effort to cooperate and exchange data of 4 MLSs mentioned above. To my understanding, there was no consolidation between involved MLSs and all of them continue operating independently.

NCREX, however, is a full merger of involved MLSs (RE Infolink, Contra Costa MLS, East Bay Regional Data (EBRD), Central Valley MLS ) According to the article in the August 3^rd Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal “When all is done, the newly created Northern California Real Estate Exchange will have 34,000 subscribers and a $20 million annual operating budget -- about twice RE Infolink's  (MLS serving San Mateo, Santa Clara, San Benito, Santa Cruz, and Monterey now)  -- making it one of the largest MLSs in the country.”

According to the information given to agents and brokers at the local association meeting this Tuesday – the effort will be completed this week. It is a result of 2.5 years of work between involved executives.

It remains to be seen which of these two efforts, Quattro and NCREX,  will prove to be more successful for clients, agents and brokers. While I would personally prefer that NCREX and Quattro combined their efforts, I am ecstatic that as an agent and broker I need to work only with two organizations to be able to show my clients houses in the Bay Area (down from 8 a few months ago!). Not only it is simpler and less expensive for involved agents and brokers, but much more compelling for clients.  However, some clients still will prefer to use Trulia for home search not to deal with the MLS “cross boundaries” problems.  As a matter of fact, members of Quattro discontinued public access to MLS. If clients want to see listings in Quattro area, they can go to Realtor.com, Trulia or individual brokers. The reason behind the Quattro decision to discontinue public access to MLS was to force clients to search listings through brokers. While it seems to be admirable I am afraid this idea is very shortsighted and will simply push many clients away from MLSs. My prediction is that at certain point Quattro will offer public access again , but it might be to little too late.

NCREX continues providing their clients with public access and NCREX agents have (at least RE Infolink agents do) read only access to Quattro.