Facebook Marketplace to Stop B2C Real Estate Listings in 2023

Meta will no longer allow businesses to create real estate listings on Facebook Marketplace.

Starting on January the 30th 2023, the classifieds platform Facebook Marketplace will not support the creation of real estate sale or rental listings from a business page. The platform is also putting an end to businesses creating listings in its autos category.

While the only national market affected by the news in the real estate category is the United States, the move will impact the autos classifieds market in nine different markets including the United States, France, Mexico and Brazil.

The classifieds marketplace will still allow C2C transactions in both the real estate and auto categories with a company announcement stating that the popular marketplace site was "simply changing how to distribute inventory".

Commenting on the news, specialist marketplace SEO consultant Mike van der Heijden said:

"When platforms become reliant on third-party platforms for their lead generation, they're essentially handing control of their business continuity over to someone else. That's a dangerous situation.

It's exactly what happened with hotels and online travel agents, some hotels rely on more than 50% of their bookings to come from OTAs. Situations like this could really hurt real estate agents if they're not investing in their own platform or website. It's always better to own the racecourse as opposed to the horse."

Facebook Marketplace was launched in 2016 as a place for the social media site's users to transact locally. The platform started to expand to allow businesses to post listings in 2018 and was a cause for concern for many in the online classifieds industry with OC&C's Toby Chapman calling it:

"one of the most widely publicised and credible threats to traditional classified business models to have emerged in recent years"

The existential threat that many in the online real estate classifieds industry feared a few years ago has so far failed to materialise. Meta's marketplace appears to be taking a step back from B2C transactions in its big-ticket categories and, although Google is showing signs that it is coming for the autos market, it has yet to make significant moves in real estate.