The speech Lions Over the Hill was made in 1993, in 1996 the National Association of Realtors rolled out Realtor.com, which was in conjunction with Homestore, later MOVE. Rupert Murdoch acquired Realtor.com and in this article explains why he bought it. 3 Reason I Bought Realtor.com. (Incidentally, Mr Murdoch, Zillow stands for a Zillion Pillows, the owners of those pillows were the target market of Zillow's consumer platform).

Fast forward MOVE (News Corp) acquired Realtor.com and later List Hub. The data distributor that was disrupted when they cut the data feeds that had been going to Trulia saying that they did not have to honor contracts with Trulia any longer because Zillow had purchased Trulia and they had become Zillow group. List Hub did not have a contract for data distribution to Zillow Group which left Zillow and Trulia scrambling to set up data syndication with MLS partners on their own. Our own MLS did not give permission for the data feed, opting to see what would happen. April 7 came and went and suddenly our listings were no longer on Zillow and Trulia.

Sometime in March when I realized that our MLS wasn't going to syndicate listings I decided it was time for me to join another MLS. Rather than explain to my sellers that my MLS had decided not to share data with Zillow and Trulia, I expanded my territory, set up a second website, joined another MLS and set up syndication through my website McCall's Real Estate.com.

Within a couple of months complaining consumers pushed the MLS board to set up data feeds with Zillow and Trulia, but I think they were down for a couple of months.