Four days after Bing Real Estate came under fire for allegedly plagiarizing listing data from Zillow, Redfin and Realtor.com, Microsoft has removed for-sale listings from its website.
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More than a week after several industry leaders raised the alarm over Microsoft’s access to listing data from Zillow, Realtor.com and Redfin, the tech giant appears to have removed the data from its Bing Real Estate platform.
Searching for homes for sale in some of the nation’s top markets, including New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Dallas, and Atlanta, results in the same answer: “Oops, no results.”
Inman first heard about the possible move Thursday night.
Microsoft declined to answer Inman’s questions, with a spokesperson noting that the company “has nothing to share at this time.” However, spokespeople for Redfin, Realtor.com and Zillow confirmed conversations with the tech giant to remove their listings from the site.
“We contacted Bing earlier this week to request the removal of all Realtor.com content, and we appreciate their prompt response,” a Realtor.com spokesperson said in an emailed statement.
“Zillow does not have a licensing agreement with Microsoft for listings or our Zestimates. Its use of our content on Bing.com/homes is not authorized by Zillow and is not permitted by our Terms of Use,” a Zillow spokesperson said. Also noted that they contacted Microsoft last week. “We have asked Microsoft to remove content originating from Zillow from the Bing.com/homes experience.”
Bing real estate page for New York City | Screenshot from Monday at 9:22 a.m. Central Time
The can of worms erupted on Monday after Inman posted a multi-threaded story on X (the site formerly known as Twitter) about Real Estate Standards Organization CEO Sam DeBord. In light of the growing number of questions from agents, brokers and other real estate professionals about Bing Real Estate, DeBord drew attention to the possibility that Microsoft will use Zillow, Redfin and Realtor.com data to power its portal.
“I’ve been getting a lot of questions about http://bing.com/homes from the real estate tech community,” he wrote in a now-deleted post on May 28. Are data and media from authorized sources? #bing #microsoft.
DeBord explained that Bing Real Estate has been around in some form for several years. However, the increase in functionality of traditional portals, such as monetized ads, mortgage calculators, and the ability for homeowners to claim their homes, has raised concerns about whether Bing Real Estate is properly complying with IDX (Internet Data Exchange) regulations, as these regulations It seems that IDX (Internet Data Exchange) regulations are not followed.
DeBord and others have acknowledged that Bing Real Estate may be a SERP (search engine results page) that simply indexes listings; however, the tech giant’s silence on its strategy makes it difficult to believe this explanation.
“It’s been around in some form for years,” he told Inman. “Many people have reported that a very stripped-down version of Bing has been showing homes for sale, and it appears to be using Zillow and Redfin, among other listing sources, to produce those displays.”
“But someone who contacted me recently said it looks like a more professional marketplace with monetized advertising. [and] The functionality is very similar to a traditional portal, such as claiming your home,” he added. “It appears to have passed the testing phase and entered a mature for-profit market.”
Inman will continue to monitor this story and post additional updates.
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