Hamptons Real Estate Association Launches Listings Website, Competes With Zillow Group's Out East

Some of the top real estate firms in the Hamptons have collaborated on a new website to serve as a portal for homebuyers and renters to search listings from multiple agencies at once.

The website, HamptonsRE.com, launched on Thursday, December 5. Brokers decided to make the website, in part, because of their dissatisfaction with Out East, a listings portal launched by Zillow Group as the successor to Hamptons Real Estate Online, or HREO.com, the previous go-to for East End real estate listings.

Brown Harris Stevens, Corcoran, Halstead, Sotheby’s and Saunders & Associates are the five founding firms of HamptonsRE.com, which is backed by a new nonprofit, the Hamptons Real Estate Association.

Robert Nelson, an executive managing director at Brown Harris Stevens, serves as the HREA president, and Theresa Quigley, an executive managing director and general counsel at Saunders, is the vice president.

In a conference call on the afternoon of launch day, several board members spoke to the need for such a website and the plans for its future.

“We had started an enterprise maybe four years ago trying to start a listings system and a portal,” Ms. Quigley said. The system was called East End Listings Exchange and was intended to launch in early 2017.

But at the very start of that year, it was announced that Zillow Group — the owner of real estate websites Zillow, Trulia, StreetEasy and more — had purchased HREO as well as the agent-facing side of the listings portal, RealNet and Open RealNet Exchange, known as OREX. With Zillow Group coming in to modernize HREO, the local effort faltered.

But then Zillow replaced HREO with Out East and OREX with Out East Agent Tools. The agent tools were largely panned by members of the East End real estate industry — and the idea of a homegrown listings system was reignited.

“It didn’t work. It failed,” Ms. Quigley said of the previous effort. “And then the new listings system came out, and we revived our efforts because there was a lot of dissatisfaction with the system — and because we had already been working on one anyway previously.”

The new effort included Michael Gabriel of Gabriels Technology Solutions, a web designer who has created real estate websites for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

“We believe the user experience is superior to other sites in its ease of operation, the way the information is presented, the style it’s presented in,” said board member Ernie Cervi of Corcoran. “You can search for an agent from any firm that participates. You can look at sales, rentals, sold data. You can do a map search.”

He added, “We’ve created a website that we feel really improves the user experience.”

Users can search for either homes for sale or homes for rent on both the North Fork and the South Fork. They can specify a geographic area by hamlet, village, radius or school district — or encircle a custom-made area of interest on the map. Search tools for rentals include the ability to search for weekly, monthly, winter, summer, or year-round occupancy, and any duration in between.

There is an initial buy-in cost for brokerages to join HamptonsRE.com and then annual costs for the operation and maintenance of the system, as well as ongoing improvements. “There’s no profit being made, and the costs will reflect the actual costs,” board member Ed Reale of Sotheby’s noted.

The website does not offer to feature certain listings for an up-charge. Agents are put on the same footing as well.

“We will not be charging advertising costs per listing like some other websites currently do,” said Nanette Hansen of Sotheby’s, the board secretary.

The website’s listings are populated by each participating brokerage’s own in-house listings system, so agents do not have to do any additional work to get their listings on HamptonsRE.com.

“It’s just a matter of exposure — getting people exposed to it,” Mr. Cervi said. “There’s really nothing that the firm has to do other than send the data.”

“This is a public-facing portal that was created by agents, for agents, and that is sensitive to the nuances of the unique characteristics of our marketplace here in the Hamptons,” said board member Andrew Saunders, the founder of Saunders & Associates. “That was the ultimate impetus for creating the portal: to have something that really reflects the unique characteristics of how business is transacted and embracing the nuances of how we do business.”

One fact cited for what makes the Hamptons market unique is the prevalence of open listings.

Ms. Hansen pointed out that there are currently 7,000 open rental listings on the market. “They are not exclusive to any one firm,” she noted.

Also making the market unique, Ms. Quigley said that, as a vacation rental area, rentals do not simply cost “X per month” as they might in New York City. On the East End, the terms of rentals and the durations of stays are varied. It does not fit into a multiple listing service system, she added.

Ms. Hansen said agents are not selling schools or shelters — “we are selling an experience.”

And that makes comparing one property to the next difficult using a traditional MLS.

“In the suburbs, up-island, it’s very easy to comp something,” Ms. Hansen said. “You’re dealing with vertical comps, or you’re dealing with similar lot sizes. Here, we have various lot sizes. There is a great distinction between south of the highway, north of the highway, whether you’re waterfront, etc. And what we’re trying to achieve with this consumer-facing website is giving the consumer the data, the tools, the sold data, and educating them so they can have a more robust experience in this market.”

“The area is a vacation resort, it’s a destination,” Ms. Quigley said. “The properties are all very unique. There’s oceanfront, there’s bayfront, there’s pondfront, there’s hills, there’s potato fields — or what used to be potato fields and now are multi-bazillion-dollar properties. But the point is, it’s all very, very different out here.”

HamptonsRE.com does not provide agents with analytics of how many people are viewing their listings, at this time, but that could be coming down the line.

“We have things lined up for phase two already,” Mr. Cervi said.

“That was an important mandate behind the creation of the portal, in that we wanted to have a public-facing site that could evolve over time and could be responsive to changes that we wanted to integrate,” Mr. Saunders said. “Since we created this with Gabriels, it is able to reflect changes and nuances that people want to incorporate. It’s really like an organism that’s going to grow and evolve.”

Though just five brokerages are participating now in HamptonsRE.com and the Hamptons Real Estate Association, others have been invited.

“This organization is open to everyone,” Mr. Reale said. “Every real estate agency here, we’ve invited them to participate, and we’re looking forward to their full participation as well.”

Stephanie Schonholz, the director of industry relations for Out East, said in a statement that agents’ concerns with Out East are being addressed.

“Agents in the Hamptons deserve a modern system that helps elevate the crucial service they provide buyers, renters and sellers,” Ms. Schonholz said. “We’re dedicated to keeping an open dialogue with our industry partners about the challenges they’re having, and evolving Out East Agent Tools based on feedback. That’s definitely been the theme for the past few months since we’ve launched — a lot of conversations with our partners that have been extremely fruitful. We’ve made hundreds of updates informed by these conversations, which agents can see a running list of at any time on the Agent Help Center.”