Homes.com and ERA renew tech and marketing partnership

Franchisor ERA Real Estate says it's renewed an agreement with Homes.com that allows consumers to search ERA.com for Internet Data Exchange (IDX) listings pulled from markets where the firm has affiliated brokerages.

The new agreement comes with a discount for ERA's 31,000 brokers and agents for the pro version of Homes.com's Homes Connect IDX websites, and expands the offerings of ERA broker and agent sites, which are all powered by Homes.com.

The sites now include a social tool that publishes property listing details and updates to social media channels; another tool generates community reports, built from various sources, for consumers.

ERA launched a new website last June that featured the IDX-sourced home search platform powered by Homes.com, the fifth-most visited real estate-related website in the U.S. from desktop computers in March.

IDX listings are pools of shared data managed by multiple listing services (MLSs) in order to enable participating members to display each other's listings.

Some see this as a workaround to the revocation of a short-lived and controversial ruling by the National Association of Realtors in 2011 that allowed franchisors to display IDX listings from their affiliated brokerages on their websites.

The ERA.com website, and others, including Re/Max (also powered by Homes.com for about seven years running), employs a workaround that transmits consumers' search requests to affiliated brokers' IDX websites, and allows them to see the results of those searches without leaving the main site.