Oh what a tangled web... of Real Estate Listings we weave

In working on listings for my folks site, I came across trulia.com some time ago. This is a site where you can automatically provide a feed in xml format, and assuming that your site is capable of dynamically refreshing the feed when trulia hits it, your listings will always be on Trulia, and always be up to date. Google has a similar xml input feed you can provide to their Google Base, but unfortunately they expire your input every 30 days or so and you have to go and give them a new file manually, so it's not quite as nice as Trulia from my perspective.

Anyway, while working to load listings to Trulia, I noticed that some of our listings were already there from a site called point2homes. This is a site that's done by the same company (I think - don't quote me on this) that does the Remerica Corporate website, and will give agents a personal page in point2homes for an additional $10 per year, and load their listings in.

Now my mother had already mentioned to me sometime back that she had problems with duplicate listings at realtor.com. That's because being at the corner of three counties we put our listings into three separate MLS systems, all of which feed into realtor.com. I'm not sure if realtor.com fixed this problem yet or not, but all of this got me to thinking about all the different places I've seen these listings being sent to and from. I wondered if other realtors were experiencing similar spaghetti journeys with their listings, or even knew where their listings were headed in cyberspace.

I thought I'd leave you with the following graphic to emphasize this crazy interconnection of listing sites. If this is the future of Real Estate Listings on the Internet, then two questions come to mind.
1.) How are we going to prevent duplicates?
and
2.) what will be the future of the MLS sites if the listings are so freely available everywhere?

Food for thought, or something like that.