Black Knight Launches Paragon MLS for Brokers

Black Knight Financial Services released an interesting product this month called Paragon for Brokers. The acronym P for B has already been created. It is an interesting product that addresses a primary complaint that brokers have about any MLS: "It levels the playing field."

The playing field problem manifests itself in a number of ways. First, if agents are using the customer portal (called Client Connect) in the MLS for auto-notification when a new listing matches a client's search criteria, the broker brand is lost. Those emails, which are estimated to be about 100,000,000 per month, are branded to the MLS and the agent. The MLS usually does not support broker branding.

Moreover, when agents adopt the MLS client portal, they are less likely to adopt the broker's system. The same is true of CMA or other reports that are MLS generated. The brokerage has no control over the ability to customize those CMAs to sell the value of the brokerage to the consumer.

Perhaps an equally significant problem is the single sign-on or smart links that are promoted to the agent in the MLS system. The broker cannot hide or eliminate products that they do not want the agent to use, like a showing solution or transaction management solution. Competitive products offered by the MLS make it hard for brokers to drive adoption of the services they offer to the agent.

Paragon for Brokers fixes these and many other problems for the broker.