Biggest News Since DOJ Win over NAR Anti-trust Lawsuit
By Anthony Longo 17 11 2009
Today’s headlines on Inman news announced in my opinion the biggest win since the victory we had over the NAR in the DOJ vs. NAR anti-trust lawsuit.
This week out in San Diego for the annual NAR conference, they made an official statement noting that indexing of MLS listings WILL BE ALLOWED. As you may know (if your a tech geek) this is a huge relief for us innovative (non-traditional) real estate brokerages who leverage technology and “Search” as a way to lower cost for our clients.
Per the article…
“The National Association of Realtors’ board of directors adopted a new policy Monday making it clear that real estate brokers can allow search engines like Google to index property listings displayed on their Web sites under data-sharing agreements with other brokers.
NAR’s board of directors approved several changes to the association’s Internet Data Exchange (IDX) policy as it wrapped up the group’s annual meeting in San Diego.
The changes included the deletion of language that previously obligated real estate brokers participating in a multiple listing service (MLS) to employ “reasonable efforts” to protect listings from “scraping,” or unauthorized duplication by third-party Web sites.
New language prohibits MLS participants from using listing data for any purpose other than display on their Web sites, but clarifies that they don’t have to protect listings from legitimate search engines like Google, which collect information from Web sites and store it in internal databases to make searches faster and more relevant.
The IDX policy, which dates to 2005, sparked a controversy in March when NAR staff issued an interpretation that equated search-engine indexing with scraping.”
The article reads on in detail of the new indexing rule which I see causing some major ruckus in the near term. One point specifically, as we have been working with regional MLS’s the past year (specifically DC & New York), the ability to provide reasonable efforts to protect data (which has since gone away).
Much more to come on this as these changes get rolled out regionally.
