Imagine a home search website created by the real estate industry, for the real estate industry – one where your listings generate free leads directly to you, and not to a competing agent. That’s the vision behind the Broker Public Portal (BPP).
In this article, we’ll break down what the BPP is, how it came to be, why it matters for agents, and how it differs from third-party portals like Zillow or Realtor.com.
What Is the Broker Public Portal (BPP)?
The Broker Public Portal (BPP) is a collaborative venture between real estate brokerages and Multiple Listing Services (MLSs) to create a national consumer home search platform. In plain terms, it’s an industry-owned home search website. Its core purpose is to connect home searchers directly with the listing agent who knows the property best. Unlike corporate listing sites, the BPP is governed and funded by brokers and MLSs rather than by advertising dollars.
At its heart, the BPP aims to “harness the power of your listings” – when a consumer finds a property, the inquiry goes right back to the agent who listed it. The platform’s mission is guided by two key principles: it’s powered by real-time MLS data (for accuracy) and it follows strict Fair Display Guidelines (for an agent-friendly experience). In short, the BPP is the real estate community’s answer to third-party portals, designed to give agents and their clients a better way to search for homes without the usual drawbacks of advertising-driven sites.
How and Why Was the BPP Created?
To understand the BPP’s origin, it helps to recall the frustration many agents felt in the 2010s. For over a decade, agents and brokers watched as third-party listing websites (like Zillow, Trulia, etc.) rose to dominance. These portals are run by advertising companies, and agents often felt they had “no choice but to spend money advertising on third-party sites” to get visibility or leads. In many cases, agents were essentially paying to promote their own listings on sites that might then turn around and sell buyer leads to other agents. This dynamic left a sour taste – agents’ listings were drawing eyeballs, but the benefit was siphoned off through expensive ads or diverted leads.
In 2014, a group of visionary brokers and MLS leaders decided to change that narrative. They launched an effort to develop a new consumer-facing website as a better, more accurate alternative to the big listing portals. Brokerage firms representing roughly 300,000 agents and MLSs with 350,000 subscribers came together to fund and build what would become the Broker Public Portal. The concept was straightforward: put control of listings back in the hands of the professionals who list and sell homes, while giving consumers a top-notch search experience using direct MLS data. From day one, the BPP’s ethos was to connect consumers with “the people who sell homes, not advertisements”. In other words, your listing, your lead.
Early on, the BPP partnered with a tech company called Homesnap to jump-start its consumer platform. In 2017, the venture “Broker Public Portal with Homesnap” rolled out a national home search app and website under the Homesnap brand, but following the BPP’s agent-first rules. This partnership quickly gained traction: Homesnap’s consumer app became one of the top-rated real estate apps, and Homesnap Pro (the agent-facing app) was made available to a majority of U.S. agents by the end of the decade.
Agents paid no extra fees to have their listings on the platform beyond their normal MLS dues, and in turn they received free leads from interested consumers. One brokerage executive on the BPP board noted, “The BPP is agent-centric; not advertising centric”, highlighting that leads generated through the portal “would not be resold” to other parties. In 2018 alone, one large brokerage reported over one million leads delivered to its agents at no charge through BPP/Homesnap – a stark contrast to buying leads from third-party sites.
However, the BPP’s journey hasn’t been without bumps. In late 2020, Homesnap was acquired by commercial real estate giant CoStar, and by 2022, the joint venture between BPP and Homesnap was brought to an end. CoStar decided to fold Homesnap into its own new residential portal (Homes.com), effectively “sunset[ting] the Homesnap brand”.
This could have left the BPP stranded – but instead, the industry coalition saw it as an opportunity. The BPP Board of Managers terminated the Homesnap agreement and set out on a new path often dubbed “BPP 2.0”. Rather than relying on a single vendor, the BPP began developing its own technology platform with the help of various industry tech partners.
The vision for BPP 2.0 was ambitious: a modern national search site and app “provided by people who sell homes, not ads”, leveraging a national MLS dataset created through data sharing among MLSs, and upholding a national display ruleset based on the Fair Display Guidelines. Essentially, the BPP doubled down on its original mission with a fresh strategy and new tech.
What Makes BPP Different from Zillow, Realtor.com, etc.?
If you’re an agent, you might be wondering: “How exactly will the Broker Public Portal be different from the big-name real estate websites my clients use now?” There are several key differentiators that set the BPP apart from third-party listing portals. Here’s a breakdown...
Industry-Owned and Agent-First Design
Unlike Zillow or Realtor.com, which are run by large corporations, the BPP is owned by brokers and MLSs themselves. Its unique structure forbids issuing profits or dividends to shareholders – meaning every dollar invested goes into building and improving the platform, not into investors’ pockets.
The result is a platform designed with agents’ and consumers’ best interests in mind, rather than one optimized to sell advertising. As one industry leader put it, BPP’s philosophy is “agent-centric, not advertising-centric”. The people behind BPP are the people who actually list and sell homes, so the site is built to support your business rather than compete with it.
Accurate, Real-Time Listings Data
One of the biggest complaints agents (and consumers) have about third-party portals is outdated or inaccurate information, like listings that show as “for sale” when they’re already under contract, or incorrect pricing and property details. The BPP addresses this by being powered directly by real-time MLS data.
Listings on a BPP-powered site update as fast as your MLS, because that’s exactly where the data comes from. Consumers get the same comprehensive, up-to-date info that agents see, which can build trust and avoid confusion. In the words of a broker involved in BPP, “The data we can deliver to our clients through the BPP is superior to anything we’ve had before…it levels the playing field [with the tech companies]”.
No more “stale” listings – if it’s sold or off-market, the BPP will reflect that promptly. For agents, this means your clients aren’t calling you about a listing that fell off the market weeks ago, and they’re less likely to miss a new listing because a portal was late to update.
Fair Display (No Competing Ads or Pay-to-Play)
The Broker Public Portal strictly follows a set of Fair Display Guidelines that provide a level playing field for listings and an uncluttered experience for consumers.
What does that mean in practice? For one, search results on BPP aren’t skewed by paid placement or “featured” listings – properties are shown based on consumer search criteria, not which agent or broker paid to be at the top.
And when a consumer clicks on a property, only the actual listing agent and broker are displayed on that property page. No ads for other agents or brokerages appear next to your listing on the BPP site.
This is a huge departure from sites like Zillow, which often show three or four buyer’s agents who’ve bought zip-code leads on the same page as the listing (sometimes even pushing the listing agent’s info to a tiny corner). On a BPP-powered portal, your listing is truly yours – the way it would be on your own brokerage’s site or an MLS consumer site.
Additionally, the BPP guidelines prohibit those annoying unrelated ads on listing pages (for insurance, movers, mortgage companies, etc., that might compete with your brokerage’s affiliates). The overall experience is cleaner and focused on the property and the agent, not on banner ads.
“Your Listing, Your Lead” – Free Leads to Listing Agents
Perhaps the most agent-friendly differentiator is how leads are handled. The Broker Public Portal operates under the mantra “Your Listing, Your Lead,” treating each property page like a virtual yard sign.
All consumer inquiries on a listing go directly and immediately to the listing brokerage or agent, at no charge. There’s no diverting of that lead to a competing agent, no selling the inquiry to three other REALTORS®, and no referral fees attached.
If you’re the listing agent, you are the one the buyer will reach. This fair lead distribution is baked into BPP’s DNA – it’s even written into the Fair Display rules that “no leads will be diverted elsewhere” and “no fees will be charged for leads”.
For agents used to the third-party portals, this is a breath of fresh air. On Zillow/Realtor.com, unless you pay those platforms, a buyer interested in your listing might end up talking to some random Premier Agent. On the BPP, inquiries on your listings are yours, period.
(It’s worth noting that brokers can configure leads as they see fit – for instance, if a team wants inquiries routed to the team hotline instead of the individual agent, the broker can do that. The key is broker control over lead routing – not portal control.)
Fewer Barriers and Biases for Consumers
Because the BPP isn’t trying to squeeze lead-gen dollars out of visitors, consumers may find it a more welcoming site. For example, many MLS-powered sites (and presumably BPP by extension) allow consumers to browse without forcing immediate registration. And if a consumer does create an account and indicate they have an agent, the platform can honor that relationship (early BPP plans even mentioned that a user’s experience could adapt if they already have a buyer’s agent, perhaps by highlighting that agent on the interface).
The BPP isn’t about capturing and selling the consumer – it’s about serving the consumer so they can easily connect with an agent. Additionally, since the BPP is funded by the industry, there’s less pressure to introduce disruptive features that might disintermediate agents (contrast this with some venture-backed portals that have at times experimented with iBuyer programs, direct offers, or other models that caused agent angst).
In essence, the Broker Public Portal’s differentiators boil down to being an agent-friendly, data-accurate, and consumer-conscious platform. It aims to combine the best of both worlds: the nationwide reach and modern interface of a big portal, with the integrity and fairness of an MLS-run site.
The 2025 Relaunch — What’s Happening and What to Expect
You might have heard that the Broker Public Portal is gearing up for a major relaunch in 2025. After the end of the Homesnap partnership in 2022, the BPP spent 2023-2024 rebuilding its platform and strategy (the “BPP 2.0” we mentioned earlier). By late 2024, the organization had a new CEO (Dan Troup, a former RE/MAX executive) and was previewing the next-gen product to its stakeholders. The official public rollout kicks off in 2025, with a phased approach...
Phase 1 – “Soft Launch” (Testing the Waters)
In mid-2025, the BPP went live in a limited capacity via a site called BrokerData.com as a soft launch. This was essentially a beta test – the BPP’s technology was deployed on a live website so that it could be tested in a real-world environment with actual listing data.
Consumers can already visit this site and get a feel for the BPP search experience. “This is allowing us to test and demonstrate our technology in a production environment that anyone can look at,” CEO Dan Troup explained.
The soft launch isn’t heavily marketed to the public, but it’s a crucial step to ensure everything works smoothly. It also signals to agents and MLSs that “Hey, this is real and it’s happening!”
Phase 2 – Local MLS Portal Rollouts
The next step will be to launch local market websites powered by BPP’s search solution, on local MLS domains. What does that mean? Essentially, your MLS’s public website (if it has one) might get an upgrade – using the BPP’s national search platform under the hood, but branded to your MLS or market.
Many MLSs have their own consumer-facing sites (some well-known ones include HAR.com in Houston, UtahRealEstate.com, etc.). The BPP is offering a way for those MLSs to “clone” the national portal for local use, so that consumers in each market can use a locally branded site with the same power as the national one.
If your MLS opts in, you might soon see a revamped MLS consumer site that looks and feels like a modern portal, but is actually part of the BPP network. This is great for agents because it means even your local MLS website will have state-of-the-art search tech (no more clunky old MLS search) and full national listing coverage – while still connecting consumers to local listing brokers and agents.
In other words, a buyer on your MLS’s site could search not just locally, but nationally, and still get connected to the right local agents through the BPP’s data-sharing. The MLSs and brokers participating are pooling their listings into a national data set held in trust by the BPP, which any participating MLS can display.
This is a huge undertaking, but if successful, it means one MLS alone can offer a “Zillow-level” breadth of listings (because reciprocity agreements allow all BPP listings to show), combined with the local expertise and branding that consumers trust in their area.
Phase 3 – National Consumer Portal Debut
The grand finale will be the launch of the BPP’s own national consumer-facing portal (effectively replacing what was Homesnap’s consumer website). This is the site that will directly go head-to-head with Zillow, Realtor.com, Redfin, Homes.com, and others on the national stage. The timing for the full national launch will depend on the progress of Phase 2 and feedback from BPP’s stakeholders – “We will launch as soon as our partners review the product and tell us to turn on their data,” Troup noted.
As of mid-2025, the expectation (per insiders) is that the national portal will go live once enough MLSs have signed on and the kinks are worked out. It could be later in 2025 or into 2026, but the momentum is building now. When it does launch, consumers across the country will have a new portal option to search for homes, one that’s industry-backed and promises a “your listing, your lead” experience.
The BPP is well aware that it will be “entering a crowded field of well-established, well-funded rivals”. Zillow and the like spend massive budgets on marketing and have huge brand recognition.
The BPP likely won’t out-spend them, so its strategy is to differentiate on quality of experience and trust. Over time, positive word-of-mouth (and perhaps some industry encouragement) will be key to drawing consumers in.
As of July 2025, the BPP reported it had 44 brokerages and 48 MLSs invested as shareholders, representing over 1 million agents nationwide. That’s a strong base of support – these aren’t just passive supporters; each has literally bought in (each investor only gets one share for $5,000) to show commitment to this vision.
It’s a crowdfunded industry effort to create a competitive national portal. For agents, this means there’s considerable weight and unity behind the project. Many of the biggest MLSs and brokerage networks are on board. The BPP’s governance is one-share-one-vote and limited to industry stakeholders, so it remains true to its mission of being “owned and operated by real estate brokerages and MLSs” – no outside investors calling the shots.
How Can Agents Prepare and Benefit?
While the BPP continues its phased rollout, here are a few practical steps and insights for agents...
Stay Informed via Your MLS/Association
Keep an eye on communications from your MLS or Association about the Broker Public Portal. If your MLS is already a BPP participant, you may receive news about new features, training, or the launch of a BPP-powered local site. If your market isn’t yet on board, you might hear discussions or see votes on joining the BPP initiative. Being informed will help you take advantage of the platform early – for example, by setting up your agent profile, learning the tools (like any mobile app for agents), and understanding how to use it in your business.
Leverage BPP in Your Marketing
Once the BPP (national or your local version) is live for consumers, consider encouraging your clients to use it. Explain the benefits to them: “It’s backed by the MLS, so you’ll get the most accurate info – and if you want more details on a property, it connects you directly with the listing agent or me, without any hassle.”
For your seller clients, mentioning the BPP could be a value-add in listing presentations: “In addition to Zillow and other sites, your home will be featured on a new industry-backed portal that serious buyers are using. On that site, inquiries come directly to me, which means I won’t miss any potential buyers – a level of service those other sites can’t promise.”
Integrate BPP Tools (e.g., Mobile App)
If you used Homesnap Pro in the past, the BPP’s new platform will likely have its own agent tools or apps. Make sure to download and familiarize yourself with any BPP-branded app or dashboard your MLS offers. These tools can help you collaborate with clients (for instance, clients can use the consumer app to search, and you, as their agent, might be able to see their activity or send them recommendations).
Early adopters often get the most out of new tech, and it can impress clients when you use a modern, MLS-sanctioned app to work with them. Also, check if the BPP/MLS site allows agent branding or personalized versions (some MLSs let agents have a branded link or app to share with their clients, which keeps the agent’s info in view).
Provide Feedback
Since BPP is an industry initiative, agent feedback is welcome and important. If you encounter any quirks or have suggestions as you start using the BPP platform, let your MLS or broker representatives know. The platform is “built by the industry” and they genuinely want to make it work for us. Being vocal (through the proper channels) can help shape features that make the portal even more useful in your day-to-day business.
Be Patient but Positive
It’s realistic to acknowledge that challenging the portal giants won’t happen overnight. Zillow, Realtor.com, and others have spent decades and fortunes to attract consumers. The BPP doesn’t necessarily need to “beat” them outright to be successful – even grabbing a modest share of consumer traffic and providing a credible alternative will benefit agents by introducing competition.
So, temper your expectations: you might not immediately get a flood of leads from BPP in week one. But support the effort and view it as a long-term play for the industry. Every friend or client you can nudge towards an industry-friendly portal is a small step toward a healthier ecosystem for agents and consumers.
As always, stay calm and sell on!
Sources
- Broker Public Portal official site – About & History of BPP: brokerpublicportal.com
- Broker Public Portal – Fair Display Guidelines: brokerpublicportal.com
- Inman News – BPP soft launch and relaunch plans (July 2025): inman.com
- HousingWire – Doorify MLS joins BPP, relaunch plans: housingwire.com
- WAV Group – BPP re-launch in Q1 2025 (Victor Lund commentary): wavgroup.com
- RealTrends/HW Media – Broker perspectives on BPP’s benefits: realtrends.com
- Broker Public Portal Blog – “BPP 2.0” vision and Your Listing, Your Lead: brokerpublicportal.com
- RISMedia – MLS in 2025: BPP purpose and non-profit model: rismedia.com