SAFE Syndication: Managing Compliance for Listing Advertising Sites – PART 1

Clareity led the way on syndication in 2011, debunking the myth that “Listings Everywhere” have as much value as some people think and showing the various ways that listing advertising websites are intentionally siphoning off leads from the listing agents and misleading consumers. Clareity illustrated exactly how leading websites were not aligned with broker and agent business objectives. Unfortunately, individual brokers don’t have the time or inclination to keep an eye on these websites in order to gauge whether it makes sense to send their listings to each site. So, Clareity Security created Safe Syndication, which facilitates the MLS providing an increasingly important member benefit to brokers and agents: helping them understand how well each listing advertising website aligns with their business objectives before choosing to syndicate their listings to those websites. With the MLS involved, it will be much easier for brokers to engage in what Clareity calls “Strategic Syndication”.

In its 2011 white paper, Clareity created the “Syndication Bill of Rights”, a set of easily measurable criteria that brokers (or MLSs) can use to help evaluate the advertising websites. Clareity suggested that MLSs rate the websites and provide educational materials to their brokers, so that brokers didn’t duplicate effort evaluating these websites. Some MLSs already use syndication services that provide guidance of the websites, but such services can have a difficult time rating the performance of these portals, especially when those syndication services being paid by the portals, and MLSs have found the report cards don’t really cover most of the criteria that brokers care about and which Clareity included in its white paper. MLSs need to take compliance evaluation further.

 

So, Clareity Security has created Safe Syndication. Safe Syndication provides a way for MLSs to establish a measurement scorecard based on their own criteria, perhaps using the Syndication Bill of Rights as a starting point, and delivers a mechanism for measuring compliance and delivering additional value to brokers and agents by providing them with the information they need to make informed syndication decisions. ListHub customers will benefit from deep integrations, including single-source entry of portal participation and complaints, as well as access to the ListHub “Report Card”. Clareity Security is open to integrations with other third parties using a similar API. In the future, Clareity Security plans to provide social integration between customers – collaboration on compliance report cards and the sharing of statistics regarding portal complaints. This feature will make it even easier for MLSs to share the effort of keeping track of all of the syndication websites.