If you try to find the Indianapolis, Indiana MLS, you won’t. It’s been replaced by a 7000-Realtor member Broker Listing Cooperative, a trademarked brand and group that serves the same educational, informational, marketing, team-up and listing service purposes of the traditional MLS. The change came about because the term MLS has lost its data and content integrity, according to Metropolitan Indianapolis Board of Realtors CEO Steve Sullivan.

We understand his thinking, as do many others, including Bob Bemis, CEO at Arizona Regional Multiple Listing Service (ARMLS) and the 14 other MLS groups that founded the MLS Domains Association. Bemis is interim president of the association. Everyone agrees that the term MLS has become generic, and that many people, firms and groups are creating organizations and sites with MLS in their name but are not real MLSs. That’s a concern.

What Bemis and Sullivan are doing about their concerns are entirely different, however. While Sullivan denied that he and the MLS Domains Association were at cross purposes, we can’t see how they’re not. He said that the creation of a dot-mls for legitimate broker-based MLS organizations would not change his group’s thinking that the BLC trademark should expand nationwide, and that his BLC just might apply for .mls if the Domains Association app is approved. We’re paraphrasing here, though his words were that any BLC “could be a part of RPR, .mls or totally separate.” We get that they might just be able to live side by side but with everything that’s being presented to MLS members, most of which requires that they spend money, it just seems like information and opportunity overload. Surely something is going to fall by the wayside.

We asked Bemis what he thought of the BLC expansion nationwide. Here’s what he told us, by e-mail:

“The Indianapolis Board created the BLC designation quite some time ago (2007 to be exact).  They are getting funding now for a pilot to see if they can gain any traction and more recognition in their marketplace, or possibly outside it, for that name.  Their answer to the lack of a copyright on the term “MLS” in the US is to create a new term and try to replace the old one.  There is serious debate about whether this will garner any followers.

“The goal of the MLS Domains Association is quite different.  The Association seeks to not only maintain “MLS” as the designation but to position websites that are named using the Dot.MLS domain as the definitive source of up to date, accurate and complete listing information for any particular market.  The Association recognizes that the term “MLS” has been burned into the psyche of the consuming public for decades and doesn’t expect that to change.  But the perception and understanding of what an MLS stands for can certainly use some improvement and that’s what the Association seeks to do.”

We wonder if tossing out MLS and replacing it across the U.S. with BLC is not throwing out the baby with the bathwater. It would seem that NAR doesn’t agree with us, however, as it gave this project a financial thumbs up when it named Broker Listing Cooperative as a winner in its Game Changer Challenge. Winners get NAR project manager help and financial assistance. Runners up just get the money. The details of this proposal, and the other winners, will be discussed May 12 at the NAR Midyear meeting. We hope to talk to NAR soon.

“We submitted to NAR a full in-depth proposal on how to market and how to model what we’ve done. They’re unveiling it next week,” Sullivan told us.

Here’s the latest PDF update on the BLC proposal to NAR.