“This is the next big thing,” said Craig Cheatham, president and CEO of The Realty Alliance. “There’s a natural flow to the real estate transaction, and that is a primary goal of this project — to create the online experience that consumers are seeking that matches the natural flow of the transaction.”
Cheatham said Cribio aims to eliminate the confusion and frustration that can occur on competing portals when consumers are steered toward business models that may not align with their needs.
“Ultimately, real estate professionals are looking to provide clarity and guidance and erase confusion and make this as smooth as possible,” he said. “We think that will make this site popular with consumers and obviously popular with agents and brokers.”
‘Picking the side of the consumer’
For BPP leaders, choosing the name Cribio was more than a marketing exercise.
“We’re always going to have this balance between what the industry wants and what consumers want, and we’re going to have to pick a side here if we want to build that trust,” said Dan Troup, CEO of BPP. “We see Cribio as picking the side of the consumer and making sure we build that trust.”
Troup added that the name, like other national portals, is short, easy to remember and intentionally nondescript.
“It represents everyone in the industry, represents all brokers, and hopefully is an easy-to-spell, easy-to-remember place that will have all the listings,” he said. “We get to define what Cribio offers to the consumer, and we’re just starting down that path now.”
Working with MLSs and brokers
Since its founding in 2014, the Broker Public Portal has worked hand-in-hand with MLSs to aggregate data and streamline access for consumers. Cheatham said that collaboration remains critical.
By uniting brokers and MLSs, Cheatham said Cribio can provide an option that builds consumer confidence without diverting them into referral networks or advertising-driven experiences.
Challenging the norm
BPP leaders detailed what stands out to them as shortcomings in competing platforms — while also offering praise to their growth strategies.
“When we developed our own websites initially, we were guilty of making them fit the broker and agent model,” Cheatham said. “And then we saw the new portals that were disruptors come in by serving the consumer so well. But they also had the fatal flaw of steering it toward their own business model. Consumers were finding that the agent they clicked on didn’t even live in that community — they had just paid to show up on this listing.”
Vice President of Products Tyler Olmsted said that Cribio is designed to avoid those outcomes.
“When we think about our mission, especially as it stands today, we want to change that narrative and win over consumers while keeping everything we’re building owned by the industry,” he said. “We look at what Zillow has done and how they’ve won consumers, and we love the path that they’ve taken. They take a really strong approach to making it consumer first.
“What we see traditionally from brokerage and MLS tech is they’re trying to serve the agents. They’re trying to serve the brokers, and that ends up as a disjointed experience for the consumer, and they don’t end up winning the trust.”
Leveraging relationships
Unlike Zillow or Homes.com, Cribio will not rely on high-cost advertising campaigns or pay-for-placement models.
Instead, leaders say, its strength comes from industry alignment.
“When you don’t know any consumers, you have to advertise,” Troup said. “The good thing is, we do have the consumer. We [Cribio] represent the agents and brokerages that represent 90% of the transactions out there today.”
Olmsted said the key is leveraging that connection between agents and consumers.
“A great way to win over these consumers is to show them the collaboration piece with the agents and with the brokerages,” he said. “It’s about showing them what we can solve that something like Zillow can’t. We can create an agent experience where they can start saving searches, finding properties and truly collaborating with their buyers and sellers on the platform.”
MLSs pay per-member fees to back Cribio — ensuring it can operate without relying on advertising, referral fees or lead charges, Troup said.
Cheatham stressed that trust and governance are central to Cribio’s long-term viability, even when it was called The Broker Public Portal
“Brokers and agents have been burned by vendors turning on them,” he said. “Sometimes that’s just a matter of mission creep, where all of a sudden they’re forgotten. Sometimes the vendor just sells out, and next thing they know, the vendor that was on their side is now competing directly with them.
“People want to know who owns this this — and because (Cribio) is an organic industry cooperative between the brokerage community and the MLS — they say, ‘Okay, we will have the ultimate user group continually providing input and steering this project to keep it relevant, to keep it functional, to keep it serving our needs. And it’s never going to turn on us.’”
