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Real estate data in high gear

By Patrick Cassidy, Cape Cod Times

HYANNIS — The real estate market on Cape Cod and the islands went "back to the future" yesterday.

Much like in the 1985 Michael J. Fox movie by the same name, officials from the Cape Cod and Islands Multiple Listing Service Inc. took a look back as they revved up for what's to come.

At a forum sponsored by the Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce in the Rectrix Aerodrome Boardroom at Barnstable Municipal Airport, officials responsible for the local MLS announced a pair of online changes in the way homebuyers interact with real estate data and listings.

"MLS is so 20th century," Cape and Islands MLS and Realtors association chief executive officer Henry DiGiacomo told the audience of about 50 people. "We had to think 21st century."

First, the Cape and Islands MLS signed up for Point2 National Listing Service, a Canadian company that compiles real estate listings internationally. For example, details for homes on Cape Cod can be viewed through a Web site alongside homes from elsewhere, Jamie Regan, president of the local MLS and Realtors association said.

Multiple listing services are a group of databases that allow real estate brokers representing sellers to share information with other brokers who represent buyers.

DiGiacomo and Regan also announced the imminent launch of an update to the local MLS site, promising it would include information on sold properties for the consumer, something that until now has been reserved for real estate professionals and releases to the media.

"That sold data will actually be available to the consumer to let them know what their home is worth," DiGiacomo said. The site should be up in about a month, he said.

The change will help the industry keep up with new generations of homebuyers who are more comfortable using computers, he said, adding that real estate professionals will still be in demand to analyze the data.

The wider availability of data in the real estate industry can be partially traced to a lawsuit brought by the U.S. Department of Justice against the National Association of Realtors, DiGiacomo said.

In that case, the government argued that restrictions on listing information that treated online real estate brokers differently from "bricks and mortar" brokers stifled competition.

"If it's on the Internet, it's in the public domain," DiGiacomo said of the government's contention. "If it's in the public domain, it belongs to the public."

Audience members were generally positive toward the more open access.

"I'm thinking it's time for Cape Cod to be thinking in a progressive way," said Kate McHugh of Century 21 Shoreland in Hyannis. "The Internet is the way of the world now."

DiGiacomo and Regan reminded the audience of how far real estate had come since the first National Association of Realtors was formed in 1908 and explained what they saw in the recent market.

In 1926, the first Cape and Islands association of Realtors was started, Regan said.

The first MLS was literally a meeting of real estate professionals who exchanged information on slips of paper, he said.

Computers soon became part of doing business and, in 2001, the real estate market was really "propelled into the Internet phase," he said.

Now, with the wider availability of listing information real estate professionals have "left being the guardians and gatekeepers of the information," Regan said.

Looking forward to new generations, such as so-called "Generation Y," born between 1981 and 1994, DiGiacomo said he saw a "tsunami tidal wave that people are oblivious to."

On the Cape, both men said there were deals to be had as home prices have dropped in recent years. But the bottom was close, they said. Not everyone in the audience agreed with such a rosy assessment.

The "extreme momentum" prior to the bottom of the market in previous downturns had not yet arrived, said Carl Persson of Cape Cod Capital Management, LLC.

But DiGiacomo and others countered this time around things were different with protections for consumers, median housing prices already up in areas and a strong local banking industry.