Indianapolis Realtors – no MLS here
If you try to find the Indianapolis, Indiana MLS, you won’t. It’s been replaced by a 7000-Realtor member Broker Listing Cooperative, a trademarked brand and group that serves the same educational, informational, marketing, team-up and listing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.
Canada’s Competition Bureau attacks MLS (updated)
The door to real estate competition — and consumer choice — continues to slowly creak open in Canada. After three years of investigation and negotiation, the federal Competition Bureau is attacking the Canadian Real Estate Association and its Multiple Listing Service, it’s reported today. With more than 90 per cent of property transactions listed on MLS, Canadian home sellers face a near-monopoly and pay an average 5 per cent commission on selling their homes; at an average price of over C$300,000, that’s a C$15,000 hit. As previously blogged here, court challenges to CREA’s rules have been unsuccessful, but a Competition Tribunal ruling may encourage the belated arrival in Canada of American services such as Trulia and Zillow — or encourage publishers like Canwest Global’s Househunting.ca and Torstar’s Homefinder.ca to enhance their digital divisions’ existing use of Adicio products. “Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small,” at least in Canada. UPDATE: Globe & Mail says the Bureau’s actions won’t encourage American-style services, but Toronto Star says a separate investigation against Toronto Real Estate Board might do so. And further National Post coverage here (including quotes from a fellow with an unusual surname).
Virtual real estate firms, new breed of online brokerage
New York City may be the first geographic step in a U.S. nationwide expansion of VOWs – Virtual Office Web sites for real estate buying and selling - as a result of a 2008 lawsuit settlement.
The U.S. Dept. of Justice filed a suit against the National Association of Realtors (NAR) IN 2005, alleging that NAR was in violation of antitrust law when it withheld listings from VOWs. Thanks to the settlement in favor of the government, a VOW can now display the same listings on its site as any other broker could in person or on the Web.
VOWs, such as CBS 2 Real Estate Market, (the first in New York City), offer online listings, and buyer-side broker services when an online user responds with interest in one of the properties displayed on the site. Commissions are generally lower than that of traditional real estate brokers because of the lack of brick and mortar costs.
The CBS2REM VOW is a partnership with the local CBS TV affiliate, WCBSTV.com, brokerage firm Property Strategies Group, and design firm LMG Digital Media. In addition to the VOW site, the partnership now offers a TV show, Home, that shows buyers around local new developments, and a monthly brick and mortar real estate teaching event.
The Real Deal recently wrote about virtual firms, talking to Eric Gordon, the managing director at RealPlus Online Listing Exchange. His shared listing database is about as close as New York City gets to an MLS. Gordon told TheRealDeal that the launch of VOWs is “huge – in a lot of ways, it levels the playing field between the small and large firms. Gordon said that no broker has been able to market another firm’s exclusive listings, until this change.
We looked at CBS2REM.com. While it’s not that attractive – far too busy - it is highly efficient, with separate searches for new developments, real estate and rentals. Without having to additionally access an advanced search, the buyer can indicate preference in building style, unit style, pet policies, square footage, ownership and even status – i.e., whether it’s a new listing or a price drop – for homes for sale. New developments can be searched by specific development, or by features such as doorperson, gym, lobby, laundry and so forth. The current database is 25,000 properties. Those who’d like to list their home fill out a feedback form requesting representation by Property Strategies Group, who charges a 5 percent commission, as opposed to the standard 6 percent.
This is a considerable change for Manhattan which has no MLS, and TheRealDeal discussed what this will mean to the local real estate market.
VOWs are not a completely new concept, however.
ZipRealty, perhaps the largest VOW in the U.S., has been around since 1999. ZipRealty is totally focused on residential listings – no rentals, and no commercial property. It works through ZipAgents, who belong to their own local MLS and real estate associations and offer virtual real estate services to consumers who come to the site looking for a home in the agent’s particular area. it has more than 3 million listings, 10,000 homes-for-sale photos, a saved-homes function and e-mail alerts for buyers. It also claims a 20-25 percent savings for buyers from the standard agent process.
Sellers who use ZipRealty have their home listed on the MLS, Google, Realtor.com and Craigslist; a yard sign; professional full-color brochures; an open house advertised in local newspapers, and hosted by the local ZipAgent; a Web page and virtual tour on ZipRealty.com; and a ZipRealty listings that includes how many buyers have saved the listings, how many page views it has realized, how many buyers have scheduled a visit, and the popularity of the property as compared with similar listings. ZipRealty claims that sellers will save 25 percent from the fees standard for typical brick and mortar real estate broker firms. AIM Group reported on new site features.
VOWs make perfect sense in this digital world; and, as with other industries that have gone virtual such as banking, may well save or make consumers considerable money when compared to brick and mortar counterparts. They still need the cooperation of local agents and brokers, however, to complete a transaction in this highly-local industry.
Canada to open up real estate listings?
Moving with typical Canadian speed, the country’s Competition Bureau is “shocked, shocked I tell you” to find the national Multiple Listing Service may be anti-competitive. It has apparently reached a (no doubt gentlemanly) tentative settlement with the Canadian Real Estate Association, which commands 5 and 6 per cent commissions on virtually all resale transactiions. As reported in The Toronto Star, the settlement may allow property information to finally become more freely available online, as in civilized countries. This a full seven years after the Toronto Real Estate Board paid $700,000 to settle with the same discount brokers currently suing both TREB and CREA for $100 million.
Brokers provide bad service on IDX listings
Should real estate brokers’ Web sites list properties from other brokerages? Maybe not. A new “secret shopper” test by the consulting firm WAV group found that agents were generally clueless – and sometimes worse – when providing information about properties they didn’t personally represent.
The WAV Group study was of 100 IDX-powered broker Web sites and was aimed at exploring whether Internet Data Exchange (IDX) reciprocity agreements are serving the needs of consumers. IDX agreements allow brokers to display listings from other members of a local multiple listing service (MLS).
Some of the conclusions:
– One third of all e-mail inquiries were never answered. Of the two-thirds that were answered, only one 25 of the 100 agents answered some of the questions posed and only five answered them all. And it took 10 hours on average to get back to the consumer.
– Many of the 100 agents polled promised to call back with more information but only 17 actually did.
– A number of agents simply “read back” the listing description as it appeared on the Web site, the WAV Group’s white paper says. “Some agents actually made suppositions about the improvements made to the property based upon what they admitted that they could determine from looking at the photos displayed with the listing.”
– Customer satisfaction is likely to be higher when consumers visit sites that syndicate listings such as Realtor.com, Yahoo Real Estate and Trulia because those sites refer inquiries directly to the listing broker or agent.
All in all, a bad report card for Realtors.
MLS launches its own real estate listings site
At first blush Homes Database looks like a normal online real estate listings site. The twist: it was started by an MLS.
MRIS, the largest MLS in the U.S., with listings in Maryland, Washington DC, Northern Virginia, and parts of West Virginia and Pennsylvania, has launched a beta version of its site displaying all listings in the MRIS MLS, but no more…for now at least – the company hopes to eventually partner with other MLS’s to create a database spanning the U.S.
Notably absent – for sale by owner listings, of course.
The site is clean and functional and has all the usual bells and whistle – homes shown in text and map format, natural language support and e-mail alerts.
Still, we have to wonder how a relatively limited newcomer to the market can compete against gorillas (and up and coming gorillas) like Realtor.com, Zillow, Trulia and others.
Take a look at Beta.HomesDatabase.com (avoid the old URL HomesDatabase.com – it’s downright ugly!)
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