I just got off the phone with Grant and Gia Freer, the founders of realseekr, a new IDX portal in beta but already ramped up with quite a few listings. Grant mentioned they expect to have 2.5 million listings (I hope I got that right) by July in time for the Inman conference. Grant and Gia said they’ve been able to ramp up their listing coverage quite quickly because they are using RETS whenever they can, and they find it much better than FTP. Yeah, RETS!
The realseekr model is pretty interesting. In contrast to Roost, another IDX portal, realseekr is only allowing one sponsoring broker per MLS. However, for $249 per year, other brokers and agents can claim their listings in that MLS and enhance them on the sponsoring broker’s site. When an agent claims their listings, their contact information will appear even if they are from a different firm than the sponsoring broker for that MLS. This is atypical of most IDX implementations, which do not display the contact information or other profile details of competing agents.
I asked if they thought other brokers in an MLS eventually would want the “top spot” on the site as well, and they said they hadn’t seen that so far. Also, it will be interesting to see if the sponsoring brokers eventually find it confusing that the contact info for their competitors is appearing on their IDX site.
Once an agent has claimed their listings, their profile appears on each of their listings along with a great set of tools for the customer to contact them, including Skype, SMS, and e-mail. Consumers also can befriend agents through the site. Each agent profile also includes Twitter updates, blog links, and other social goodness. Listings also can be “socialized” by bookmarking them on many different bookmarking sites. Grant and Gia both emphasized that they are trying to provide a platform for agents to show their expertise to consumers and allow for easy engagement.
I really enjoyed the conversation with Grant and Gia and they are super passionate about their work. They started the site out of frustration with the current players and being convinced they could provide more value. They’re definitely going to be interesting to watch.
I’m excited about the panel we’ve assembled for our FBS Summit on June 12 to discuss the issue of whether or not MLSs should have consumer-oriented listing search sites:
This panel brings a variety of perspectives on listing search sites, and we’ve convinced them to spend three hours with us so we can delve deeply into the issues. We’re going to have three one-hour sessions: (1) initial overviews by the panelists of their views; (2) a panel discussion moderated by me; and (2) round-table discussions with one panelist at each table for 12-15 minutes and then rotating to the next table until each table has had an opportunity to ask questions of each panelist.
With the recent settlement of the NAR/DOJ litigation on VOWs, I think this topic is more relevant than ever and I can’t wait to delve into the issues. If you have any questions you think I should ask of the panel, comment on this post and I’ll follow up after the event here with their responses.
start with Thompson’s Realty. Congratulations Jay and Francy and the Butterworth Group.
Dustin pulled together a fun call with a great group. If you have a spare hour, enjoy.
Dustin Luther of 4realz e-mailed me a few hours ago wondering if I wanted to participate on a live podcast regarding the NAR/DOJ Settlement. The event starts at 4 p.m. Pacific time, 6 p.m Central time, and can be found here. You can both listen in and participate if you want. I think it’s going to be fun and hopefully interesting.
I was at a birthday party for one of my in-laws over the weekend. During dinner, I sat next to one of my wife’s uncles and we had an interesting conversation. Before I delve into the conversation, though, let me give you just a bit of background. My wife’s mom is one of fourteen siblings and so their extended family is huge. We had over 300 people at our wedding and I think I invited around 30. We’ve been married for a dozen years now and I’ve come to know many of the relatives but there remains a significant group I’ve only met a few times and definitely don’t know well. Part of this group are what are known affectionately as the couch uncles, because they tend to sit together on the couch at family gatherings and fall asleep. The uncle who is the subject of this post, Richie, is one of the couch uncles and someone I really had not gotten to know much about until just the other day. I’m glad I did.
During dinner, my brother-in-law was chatting with Richie and they started talking about a job Richie had at a manufacturing plant several years back. Richie made a comment like, “that was the best job I ever had.” That perked up my ears and I asked him why it was better. At first he sort of looked at me wondering why I cared, but then he must have concluded it was okay and he responded with ease and clarity:
I jotted the above down on my phone as fast as I could as he was talking, because I really wanted to remember it as close to what he said as possible. The insights are central to what makes us human: independence, adding value through competence, and respect/reward for that competence.
I find great motivation in these words and ideas because they go to the core of what I’m aiming for in our employee-owned company. Importantly, however, expressing the ideas of independence and reward for competence is much easier than weaving them into your culture and processes. As our company grows, our teams get bigger and our reliance on others deepens. This is requiring us to evaluate our project management and development processes to try to maximize independence and control for each developer while recognizing the inter-relationships their work has with others. Finding that balance is difficult but critical.
One of the blogs I find most fascinating is Signal vs. Noise from 37signals. These guys seem like a bunch of pretty happy software developers and so their advice is worth considering. From what I can tell and based on my experience as a practicing lawyer, I think these guys operate much in the way a small law firm operates, essentially professional peers working together toward a common goal but on equal footing with each in control of their own projects and careers. Each benefits from the relationships in the firm but each person also remains their own.
A team of our developers is working on revising our development process now and I’m hopeful the result will be a process emphasizing individual control in a peer environment. Perhaps then we’ll be able to define the best job here at FBS, so that at some dinner conversation years from now, we’ll all be able to say to our relatives, “FBS was the best job I ever had.”
I’ve had my first pass over the terms of the settlement of the NAR/DOJ litigation over VOWs (virtual office web sites). Though I was surprised by the announcement of the settlement, I’m not surprised by the fact the litigation finally settled. In fact, during a couple of different meetings in D.C. a week or so ago, I mentioned to people that I felt the litigation was, for practical purposes, irrelevant. As such, I don’t see the settlement as huge news (it won’t likely be a game changer), though it’s definitely interesting news.
The action on the web has shifted over the last few years from VOWs (authenticated access) to syndication (advertising oriented, non-authenticated sites), with everyone racing to get listings nearly everywhere instead of trying to figure out how to control where the listings are going to be shown. If anything, I think the settlement puts an arrow back in the quiver for brokers, MLSs, their vendors, and others to develop hybrid systems bridging the gap between syndication sites and client service oriented sites. In this regard, I definitely see the settlement as a win for everyone, as it clears away the last vestiges of this issue.
Though I think the settlement is a “good thing” and don’t believe the NAR gave up much of importance given the current reality of listing distribution on the web, the DOJ did get pretty much everything they wanted in the settlement. The primary issue in the VOW litigation was whether a participant could keep some VOWs from displaying their listings while allowing others. This was known in the litigation as the “selective opt-out” provision because it allowed participants to select which web sites could display their listings in a VOW and which could not. On that front, the DOJ clearly prevailed as there is no selective opt out in the new policy. In fact, the only opt-out available now is by the seller:
An MLS shall, if requested by a Participant, provide basic ‘downloading’ of all MLS non-confidential listing data . . . . Confidential data includes only that which Participants are prohibited from providing to customers orally and by all other delivery mechanisms. . . . If an MLS provides a VOW-specific feed, that feed must include all of the non-confidential data included in the feed described . . . above excpet for listings or property addresses of sellers who have elected not to have their listings or addresses displayed on the Internet.
Settlement Agreement Sections III(2) and III(4) (emphasis added).
Earlier, Section II(5) of the Agreement specifies that, in order to have their listing excluded from the VOW feed, a seller must “affirmatively direct their listings brokers to withhold their listing or property address from display on the Internent” by signing a document that says “I understand and acknowledge that . . . consumers who conduct searches for listings on the Internet will not see infomration about the listing property in response to their search.”
In other words, this seller exception is no back door way of getting a selective opt out. First, it’s not selective, it’s all or nothing. Second, very few sellers will want their listings completely off the web. The end result is that a VOW will be able to display all listings from all participants, with no blanket opt-outs allowed except by the seller. This is a clear departure from the selective opt-out fought for by NAR and even the IDX blanket opt-out.
I think this last point is important. Way back when, the impetus to VOWs was to get around the limitation in some IDX policies allowing participants to opt out or even requiring them to opt in to include their listings in the IDX feeds from the MLS. There were and are several markets where participants with significant market share were not participating in IDX, making that program ineffective, and so those who wanted to display all the MLS listings on the web argued that a VOW should be able to display all the listings just like they could show all the listings if a consumer came into their physical office. That’s where everything fell apart, because there were participants who didn’t want to be told what they had to with their listings. With this new VOW settlement, however, no opt outs are possible and everyone is opted in, which means the DOJ won this point decisively.
The DOJ also appears to have won the other major issue in the litigation: referral fees. Section III(11) of the Agreement says, “An MLS may not prohibit, restrict, or impede a Participant from referring Registrants to any person or from obtaining a fee for such referral.” This was the big argument raised by RE/MAX, Realogy and others, namely that they didn’t want to provide their data to a web company only to have it sold back to them in the form of a referral fee. As Dave Liniger is often quoted as saying, this is “like the guy who shows up at a pot-luck dinner bringing only a fork.” RE/MAX even went so far as to say that they’d advocate withdrawing from MLSs if selective opt-out was not allowed, and that ultimately gave rise to the ill-fated ILD policy and the DOJ litigation.
I suspect the reason the litgation was able to be settled was because no one really cares about this issue any more. The listings are flowing everywhere already, referral fees and other models are developing regardless and the main issue now is effectiveness and cost and not who is providing what service. Perhaps the litigation bought some time for a variety of competitors but I think the more likely conclusion is that the market just found the solutions around the litigation, making it irrelevant enough that a settlement could be crafted.
One of the more interesting provisions from an enforcement perspective is what I’ll call the “no outsourced call center” provision, which appears to be a requirement NAR sought to balance the referral fee provision won by DOJ:
A Participant’s VOW must prominently display an e-mail address, telephone number, or specific identification of another mode of communication (e.g., live chat) by which a consumer can contact the Participant to ask questions, or get more information, about properties displayed on the VOW. The Participant, or a non-principal broker or sales licensee licensed with the Participant, must be willing and able to respond knowledgeably to inquiries from Registrants about properties within the market area served by that Participant and displayed on the VOW.
Enforcing this provision is going to be interesting. What does knowledgeable mean in this context? What is the “market area” served? The provision definitely has the potential to thwart abuses of the referral fee provision by trying to require that VOWs be operated by “real” agents but it seems to open a huge can of worms for MLSs and others trying to figure out who the real agent is or isn’t.
There are all sorts of other interesting provisions that are different from the earlier ILD/VOW policies, such as the indirect recognition of Zillow and Trulia in Section II(5)(c) by allowing the seller to require removal of automated value estimates (zestimates) and comments or other discussion about the listings. I’ll likely cover these and other provisions in a separate post, as I want to get this posted first to see what others are finding before delving into more of the minutiae.
The main conclusion I have from the settlement is that it’s about time and doesn’t really change the game in a big way, but it clears the field for innovation in the space between the MLS system and listing portals.
Coverage elsewhere:
Press releases from the NAR and DOJ announce the settlement. The actual terms of the settlement are the key and I’m reading them now and will be posting my thoughts soon.
Taken last evening with my Treo 700p from the dock at our cabin on West Battle lake in Minnesota. I’m thinking I need a new phone for a lot of reasons, but a better camera would be a big one. Nonetheless, this is a cool photo, I think.
Inman has yet another article today on NAR’s recent rules trying to control use of the term MLS by their members in promoting their web sites. Here’s a not too hypothetical question: What if FBS were to create an IDX site that uses our domain and registered trademark flexmls® in the URL where agents or brokers could have domains like brokername.idx.flexmls.com? Would that violate NAR’s rules? I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t or shouldn’t but would love to hear what others think.
Follow-up: Even less hypothetical: How about portal.flexmls.com/agentname?
