We just talked with Duncan Logan, CEO and founder of NationalBLS.com, about the recently announced API that will allow real estate sites and MLSs to share revenue for helping bring buyers and sellers together via their own site visitors and NationalBLS. Since our first announcement of the new project, we discovered that Logan and his team are also in discussions with newspapers as well, and would also welcome broadcast sites.

“We’re in late-stage discussions with high-traffic Web sites that get millions of visitors each month,” Logan told us. “We hand back to them the buyers in an anonymous format.” He called what the NationalBLS.com is doing with what he calls its partners and partners-to-be an “EHarmony sort of thing, where they can start to match buyers with sellers.” Logan thinks it will happen quite quickly.

“In real estate it’s very easy to see the supply side,” he told us. “We have thousands of sites and blogs to show that, but nothing that views the demand. And I believe showing the demand is fundamental to the efficiency of the real estate market.”

NationalBLS is focused on illuminating the shadow market – those folks who for whatever reason, would like to buy or sell but haven’t made that interest public.

“There are thousands – maybe millions – who haven’t put their property on the market,” Logan said. He conjectured that they might not want the neighbors to know they’re selling, or they don’t want to have to deal with six months of open houses, or they have tenants they don’t want to alert. We also suggested that perhaps people were holding off being public about it because now was not the time to add glut to the already-glutted market and drive the price down further.

Logan suggested that these folks would be willing to accept a reduced selling price for the opportunity of a quiet NationalBLS match with hot buyer prospects. “That’s been a side market that we didn’t expect,” he said.

We walked through the buyer sign up on the NationalBLS site. Not only is it easy and all-encompassing, with lots of clarifying questions about what we’d be willing to pay and what we wanted, but it also gave us the opportunity to be specific about what we sought. If, for example, we preferred a certain neighborhood or street, or were looking to invest in a condo and were enamored of a couple of especially nice communities that seldom had properties for sale we could indicate that and let the site alert us when they came open. We evidenced the reason Logan called it “EHarmony-ish.”

The revenue share model, in its most simplistic form, is the media partners enabling NBLS widgets on its site, and NBLS sharing with that partner a percentage of the revenue that comes to NationalBLS as a result. If one site should bring the buyer to the table and another site the seller, they each share in the profit. Partners don’t spend any money up front. Even bloggers can participate. They don’t need to have real estate listings, just have an audience and a real estate focus. If a network or other group should bring in multiple sites as NationalBLS partners, it would earn 10 percent of the revenue share of each partner that earns any.

Logan compared it positively to NAR’s new Realtors Property Resource , saying that NBLS would gather partner info, but in contrast to RPR would actually share with them the profits of their contribution. [for details on RPR, see CIR 11.05, March 11]

“The good thing for us is that real estate companies have always thought that technology companies have taken things off their table and they haven’t been receptive,” said Logan. “The one thing that disappoints me about RPR and NAR is that RPR doesn’t increase transaction volume. Everyone gets that we will increase transaction volume.”

Real estate agents have not all jumped for joy at the product. Just as with RPR some welcome the new NationalBLS API with open arms, some reserve judgment and others see it as their own competion, because of the product’s intent to reward better for buyer and seller communication that would seem to bypass real estate professionals.

But NationalBLS wants and needs the agents, brokers and MLSs, according to Logan.

“The liability of our not having professional oversight by agents would be like EBay saying we don’t care if we have stolen goods on our site.” Besides, NationalBLS is advantageous for the industry as a whole, Logan said.

“A mortgage company might say, we’re looking for all buyers of $300-$600k property, for example,” he said. “We’ll be able to bring hundreds of millions of dollars into real estate from other industries that see the value of this.  There are no hidden agendas. From every dollar we ever generate from anything partners send to us they will get their share.”

NationalBLS media collaborators will be announced starting in April. As the product rolls out and these sites start to evaluate their results, we’ll share that information and our own evaluation with our clients by way of CIR. If you’d like to demo the product, as buyer or seller, you can do so here.