There’s one Coachella Valley, but from the eyes of many longtime real estate agents, there are two distinct territories. Palm Springs — and everything else. Palm Springs draws heavily on its star-studded links to Hollywood and mecca of retro and new midcentury homes to attract buyers. “There’s a difference in culture,” said David Banks, a board member of the California Desert Association of Realtors. For instance, he said, “Palm Springs is the old Movie Colony area.” That’s partly why there’s not one, but two, real estate groups that sell homes and condos in the desert.
The 760-member Palm Springs Regional Association of Realtors is near the airport. The much larger California Desert Association of Realtors, which has 3,000 members, is based in Palm Desert. Each group keeps its own database of property listings. Though state-licensed agents can and usually do list and sell property in any city, most carve niches, such as luxury, architectural, golf course fairway or Palm Springs modern homes.
Maintaining accurate, up-to-date data on property listings, therefore, is crucial to the success of the business. Agents have long struggled with how much data should be shared. In September, CDAR plans to withdraw from a giant conglomerate of property listings in Southern California. CARETS, or California Real Estate Technology Services, aggregates more than 100,000 listings from seven regional databases throughout Ventura County, Los Angeles and the Inland Empire.
CDAR’s expected secession will prevent agents outside of the desert from easily seeing its privately owned data. For example, unless a Beverly Hills agent joins one of the two desert associations or individually contacts a local agent, that agent can’t see a complete profile of a Coachella Valley home. Confidential data, such as a homeowner’s phone number and instructions for showing a house, are kept in private databases maintained by associations. In industry terms, this database is called a multiple listing service, or MLS.
These databases are primarily a tool for agents. But they have become essential to a buyer’s research. Databases electronically send basic details of a home — asking price, number of rooms, amount of HOA dues, for example — to free public sites, including Realtor.com, Zillow and Trulia. The withdrawal will not affect what the buying and selling public sees online, CDAR officials say. “The public is not going to see a difference,” said Banks, the MLS chair of his association.
But what it does is offer a better understanding of how agents leverage and control data to promote the value of land in the Coachella Valley. As any buyer knows, location matters. Neighborhoods can be lively or quiet. Homes can be spacious or compact. Cities have nightlife, special taxes, building codes, cultural vibes. Local agents know local areas best, they say. Before the rise of free websites such as Zillow, it was harder to promote a desert home to buyers outside of the area.
The Coachella Valley is nestled at the foot of the San Jacinto and Santa Rosa Mountains, roughly two hours east from downtown Los Angeles and at least one hour from Riverside.
Agents used CARETS to expose a property to more people: other agents and buyers. “At its height, there were 95,000 agents in principally the SoCal area that would seek access to a property listing,” said Rick Stever, chairman of CARETS. “If you expose a listing and property for sale to the largest potential population, for the buyer, you would obtain the best price, you get additional exposure.” CARETS compiles listings from different databases into one standard format, Stever said. The service was especially needed in dense metro areas. “It was a vehicle for us to continue our sphere of influence, to put our properties in front of more people,” Banks said. “As the Internet grew, that value diminished.”
In August, the largest regional database, an Inland Empire-focused group of 62,000 members, plans to withdraw from CARETS. With the largest player gone, CDAR will also detach the next month. It will run its own database that is refreshed every 15 minutes. Electronic feeds to Zillow and Trulia can be up to two weeks old. “It (CARETS) ceased to be beneficial to CDAR,” Banks said. “None of the areas are contiguous to us.”
In the desert, CDAR will continue to share all listings with its sister association. “They will be doing a data-share with our system, so their listings will still be submitted to us, and our listings will still be submitted to them,” said DaVina Lara, CEO of the Palm Springs Regional Association of Realtors. “So our systems will still be communicating with one another. But they will not be sharing their listings with any of the other MLS’s that make up CARETS.”
The Palm Springs group will remain part of CARETS, for one major reason: It uses the same database as west Los Angeles, Malibu and Beverly Hills. That means a Palm Springs property, such as the $5.2 million home that Leonardo DiCaprio purchased in January, can be marketed instantly to a celebrity’s agent on the west side.
Dominique Fong is a business and real estate reporter for The Desert Sun. She can be reached at (760) 778-4661, [email protected] and on Twitter @dominiquefong.