Sign up to receive alerts when articles like this are published. Brokers and Brokerage Firms Real Estate n effort by real estate firms to create Manhattan's first multiple listing service and joint Web site ended yesterday, having fallen victim to a lack of support and squabbling among the city's largest brokerage firms. The board of brokers that created the Web site voted unanimously yesterday to dissolve their partnership and shut down the site. By April, only 37 of the group's original 118 firms remained. The joint Web site, which began last October, was still online yesterday afternoon, but is expected to be taken out of service within days.
Cooperation makes it happen.
Manhattan is the only major real estate market in the country without a multiple listing service, which allows customers to shop for all the available properties in a given geographic area through a single broker. The public site was seen as the first step in creating such a service, which would have allowed the firms to share detailed information, like addresses of all their listings. It was created out of the desire of small and medium-size firms to have an alternative to the multiple listing service and public Web site that two large firms, Douglas Elliman and the Corcoran Group, proposed creating in July. The small and medium-size firms, joined by one large firm, Brown Harris Stevens, got their site off the ground in October, leading Corcoran and Elliman to join them. But the two sides could not agree on virtually anything, including a software company to use and members' fees.