I just received an email that says, “San Francisco, CA – December 1, 2006 – The San Francisco Association of Realtors will remove public access to its MLS site as of January 1, 2007.”
It’s actually an advertisement of some kind suggesting that without the Public Access Site provided by the MLS, every broker will need their own, now more than ever. Robbie…Galen…there’s a heads up for you.
I thought NAR required that every MLS have a “Public Site”, albeit a crappy one. Anyone know if that rule changed?
The action is being taken to drive traffic now received by sfarmls.com to broker websites in an effort to establish REALTORS® as the first point of contact for consumers looking for real property in San Francisco and the Northern Peninsula.
You had me scared. I thought it was another Pittsburgh.
I think many brokers & agents are against public MLS sites because they see it as competition. I suspect most consumers don’t care because many broker sites are signifigantly better than public MLS sites (at least in this neck of the woods).
I’d rather have the MLS spend their limited IT budgets on better download methods for us software/web engineers and I suspect agents/brokers would prefer better private MLS site features (maps, mobile access, insert feature wish list here, etc.)
Ardell, we navigated through the whole ‘Broker Reciprocity’
issue here a year or so ago. And now two different but overlapping Realtor Boards in Chicagoland are in an “on again/off again”
tug-of-war over territory (Suburbs and City). Some agents have to pay dues to two different entities just so they can access every listing in the area. Anyway, the general public can either access the MLS through a brokers website or through Realtor.com. And you know what? They don’t seem to mind at all because the new people entering into the market place never knew the old way and the old people have already purchased or sold. Basically, its just like everything else in life, the sky never falls and everything and body just adapts.
I don’t believe there’s an NAR rule about public access of the MLS. In Cincy, the local board shut down the public site. The court rules that no public site was required because the local MLS’ bylaws did not require there to be a public site.
Not sure if I quoted the full text of the REALTOR magazine article but a large portion of it can be found in this post.
I’m with Geno…let’s pretend there is no old way 🙂 I’ve read through the rules for VOW/ILD/IDX many times, and I still can’t get the difference between the three of them. There are different rules for VOW’s…most of what we see is IDX…not sure what an ILD is… Can someone point me to a well known VOW site vs. IDX site?
I think Robbie and Galen and others are correct when they complain that an office with 150 agents, shouldn’t be restricted to THE broker’s one or two download agreements. 150 agents should be able to pick their own website provider, and not be bound to the broker based feed.
Anyone know what happened to Broker Only Licensure? I was hoping that would help here in WA. It was already to pass and now I’ve heard nothing for over a year. Russ? What’s holding that up?
Why shouldn’t a group of CRS agents, for example, be able to have a super duper CRS site, with agents from several different brokerage offices as participants and a property search feature?
I think it would be cool if you ad 12 agents from different brokerages in different service areas get together and form their own site. Or maybe 12 small brokerages. Puts the smaller broker on an even keel with some of the larger ones. Who makes the rules that says small brokerages can’t share a site and an mls feed?