After running a poll that revealed the growing interest in independent showing services, Delta Media Group has announced its own rival for Zillow’s ShowingTime, called Local Showings, an independent and fully stocked property showing software and service product set to launch in April.
Delta Media’s CEO and Owner Michael Minard in a statement:
“We will provide a frictionless experience for brokerages, local MLS boards and agents. We are not trying to reinvent the wheel. ‘Local Showings’ is intuitive, so agents don’t need to go through hours and hours of training to understand it: It just works.
“We also don’t want to disrupt any established budgets. We plan to come in either at the price firms were paying, or even less, so they can avoid funding a company that is no longer a disruptor but a competitor.”
The group has also promised a second development phase for Local Showings, which will enhance call center support and add better tech resources with new functionality, along with new capabilities that the group claims do not exist for any other independent showing products.
Local Showings features include:
Hundreds of companies around the U.S. are currently integrated with Delta Media, comprising of over 350 real estate companies, covering 90% of real estate data nationwide. Though Zillow has moved away from the MLS model to an IDX, Delta Media is keeping up competing with the real estate giant with the launch of Local Showings.
However, Delta Media isn't alone in this endeavor. CoStar Group had announced another showing service product after the ShowingTime acquisition. Whether the ShowingTime acquisition sparked a new trend within the real estate sector or this is just the logical next step towards the complete digitization of the homebuying process, it's a trend that will continue to catch on.