When the Open Real Estate initiative launched on Monday, one brokerage’s name was noticeably missing from the list of founding firms and initial participants.
“It would have been nice to be at the table, but obviously those guys didn’t see me at their level,” Hoby Hanna, the CEO of Howard Hanna Real Estate Services, told HousingWire.
Since the nationwide residential real estate data sharing initiative was announced on Monday, Hanna, a HousingWire Vanguard award winner, said the Open Real Estate founders have been in touch with him to discuss the initiative.
“We were approached to see if we’d like to have a discussion to learn more and find out what direction they want to go in,” Hanna said. “I’ve agreed to meet with them, but no dates or anything have been set yet. I’m curious to learn more because right now I can only speculate off off the information that is publicly available.”
Hanna said he is really curious to learn what the end goal of the initiative is and if they have any plans in place for governance and funding.
As of right now, given the limited amount of information he has, Hanna said he is unsure if Howard Hanna, a RealTrends Verified brokerage, will join Open Real Estate.
“We have invested a lot of time and money into the platform we have built, HannaList,” Hanna said. “We are moving forward with that and we’ve cooperated with MLSs to build it, so I’d really have to understand what the end game is and get a sense of if they can really pull it off before deciding if we will participate.”
Hanna noted that he was previously part of the disbanded Project Upstream, which in some ways may add to his skepticism of this initiative actually getting off the ground.
“One of the challenges with Project Upstream, beyond maybe the technology available at the time not being what we needed, was that there were too many people involved,” Hanna said. “Just so many proverbial cooks in the kitchen with too many disparate interests from the National Association of Realtors (NAR), to the MLS, to brokerages, agents and the consumers.”
Although disappointed to not have been included in the initial conversations, Hanna said he is glad to see some of the industry’s largest players coming together.
“One of the industry’s other problems in the past has been that not everybody is willing to talk and [there is] this lack of trust,” Hanna. “Sure, I would have loved to have been at the table since it is something that we as a company have been innovating on and growing already and could give the pros and cons on. I think there needs to be reform in our industry, and I do think that the large brokerage firms need to be the ones driving it because they have so many people they impact.”
For its part, a spokesperson for Open Real Estate told HousingWire that the initiative was “founded on the belief that the future of housing information should be shaped by the entire industry.”
“We welcome the perspectives of all industry leaders, and our announcement was just the beginning of this collaborative effort,” the spokesperson added. “We have already received significant interest from the sector since our announcement, and we look forward to continuing to engage with brokerages of all sizes, MLS organizations and technology providers as we develop a platform that expands consumer choice and transparency for home buyers and sellers.”
