Newly branded portal aims to rival Zillow, Homes.com — with MLS backing 

The Broker Public Portal (BPP), a company formed by a large group of brokers and multiple listing services, has a new name for its national listing site: Cribio.

BPP CEO Dan Troup and VP of Products Tyler Olmsted announced the name in an exclusive interview with Real Estate News. A Cribio app is set to be released later this year. 

What's in a name? 

In June, BPP soft launched BrokerData.com but didn't want to be pigeonholed by that particular name. Instead, BPP sought something short, easy to spell and that incorporated a made-up word "so we can define what it is," similar to Zillow, Trulia and Redfin, Troup explained.

While the site was established by industry groups, Troup noted that "Cribio is a consumer brand, not an agent brand."

'A more interesting way' to deliver listings

In August, Troup told Real Estate News that BPP won't charge for leads or referrals, or for "advertising that competes with the broker."

For consumers, that means a home search site that isn't designed to squeeze profit through "forced interactions" such as paid-for "recommended" listings served up in search results, offers to purchase mortgage products and other ads.

"We think there's a more interesting way to do this that's totally consumer-first, and about getting the properties in front of them and not trying to sell them something along the way," Troup added.

As for the search platform itself, the idea was to make it "very familiar, but with a twist," Troup said. It includes conventional search filters but also incorporates a "Smart Search" that allows consumers to name the specific features they're looking for.

The ultimate goal? To make Cribio "the search engine of real estate," Olmsted said.

No gatekeeping of data 

Because the MLSs and brokers who partner with BPP own the site's technology and data, Troup said the site can gather consumer search information to potentially improve how they're offering listing data.

"Providing that back — the metrics of how people search — is something that's always been held within portals," he said. 

"Are they sharing that back with the industry? No." 

Consumers over profit

BPP wants Cribio "to prove that within the industry we can build for consumers without compromise," Olmsted said. 

"Traditionally, when the industry has built real estate tech, it's not for the consumer," he said. "Ultimately, it ends up being for the brokerage or the agent, or about getting leads."

But when a portal's purpose is to profit, Troup says consumers don't get the best experience.

So how will it make money? 

BPP's mandate is not to make a profit, but to break even, and it's offering MLSs something "unique," Troup said: local versions of Cribio under their own MLS brands and domains. To participate, MLSs are asked to pay "a small fee" of 50 cents per member per month.

"Imagine you went into Stellar MLS in Orlando or you went into Canopy [in North Carolina] [and had] the ability to access nationwide data locally," Troup said. "We call it brokers without borders."

Growth through word of mouth, MLS backing

"From a national search campaign, you won't see anything from the BPP," Troup said. 

Instead, they hope to grow Cribio through "the relationships that we have today, that agents have with their consumers to give them a safe place to send where they're not going to have to buy their client or their client's not going to get lost," Troup said.

Besides, BPP can't afford to mount the ad campaigns its rivals can, Troup noted. "We don't have Lil Wayne money," Troup said. "We can't make a Super Bowl commercial." 

Even so, BPP thinks it can compete with the leading portals. "We are competing with them technically, and we very much feel that way internally," Troup said.

But first, the site needs national coverage. So far, four MLSs — Canopy MLS, MIBOR, Doorify MLS and MRED, which joined last month — have signed on. 

"We need MLSs to back us; we need brokers to back us," Troup said. "I don't care how great our consumer experience is, but if I go to Denver and there's no properties there, what are we even doing?"

Correction: An earlier version of this story characterized Cribio as a rebrand of Broker Public Portal. It is the newly named brand of BPP's home search portal.