Zillow's StreetEasy to Stop Banning Agents Who Keep Some Listings Private

The Zillow-owned New York City real estate portal StreetEasy will not penalize agents for failing to upload their listings to its platform and will instead ban individual listings from the portal if they are not uploaded 24 hours after being made public.

The new policy, announced last week, is a reversal from StreetEasy's previous policy whereby agents risked having all their listings banned from the portal if they failed to upload all listings on their books to the platform within 24 hours of being published elsewhere.

StreetEasy is an unpopular market leader in New York where its dominance of consumer traffic in a very tight market with little inventory has been creating friction with the city's agents for some time. Over the last few years, the portal has had ongoing run-ins with customers such as Douglas Elliman and courted controversy around certain features on its listings.

The new, slightly more agent-friendly policy may be a recognition on the part of StreetEasy's owners that competition in the New York real estate marketing space is about to heat up with the long-awaited entrance of a CoStar-backed rival. CitySnap is the name given to the portal which is currently in development at CoStar-owned Homesnap and which is being developed in partnership with the agent industry association The Real Estate Board of New York.