Your Local MLS. Friend or Foe?

Bernice Ross posted a great article on Inman News about tagging your video content. Since so many of us are starting to do video now, the importance of  copyrighting your content is important.

And visually watermarking or putting text on your Tagging or "watermarking" your home photos is another way to brand your brokerage, too. Adding small white text on the bottoms of your photo can be added in Photoshop if you're "all thumbs" when it comes to doing fancier things like watermarking.

 

So for example: "© 2010 Broker Bob, AmazingRealty.com" could be on the bottoms of all your photos.

 

 

 

Because when it comes to listing syndication, there's lots of portals out there that push your listings out to more people. And if your broker or agent website is stamped on them, people will see them and might manually enter your web address into their browser and come visit you online.

 

You have to be careful with some MLS systems such as MRIS for example. Hands down, they are quite probably the single largest MLS association in the U.S. They are also the biggest headache for brokers.

 

Why?

 

Because once you sign up for the MLS access, you literally give up any and all rights to your listings. It's quite infuriating for brokers and agents to learn this -- but that's the MRIS MLS monopoly. You have zero choice if you are a broker-agent in Virginia, Maryland, DC area or parts of Pennsylvania where MRIS is the only MLS player in town.

 

"The Listings Belong to the Broker," right? Nope. thanks to MRIS -- you just signed your rights away to all of your listings. 

 

MRIS has fine print that a lot of brokers and agents fail to READ. Because MRIS owns the photos. MRIS owns the entire listing. Every bit of it even down to the MLS #. Many brokers and agents are getting stiff FINES from the MRIS Gestapo, now.  A few of them are my clients in the Virginia market.

 

Ira Luntz often speaks out about the dangers of the MLS regaining too much control over the broker listings.  Ira is a friend of mine and his career spans more than 30 years now in real estate. In the late 1980's Ira developed the first electronic MLS -- Boris Systems. This was later sold to Northwest Mortgage for $15 million.

 

Ira was also a co-founder of Clareity Consulting and a founder of HomeSeekers.com -- an MLS system -- which was later sold to Fidelity National Information Solutions. Ira is about as smart as they come --  and today, Ira is the President and Founder of the Real Estate Information Professionals Association -- REIPA.org.

 

Ira speaks of the dangers involved when brokers become unwilling participants and lose the ownership of their listings by unscrupulous MLS associations like MRIS.

 

Why are some MLS associations giving MLS access tools to brokers while forcing them to give up ownership of the listing?

 

Because the MLS organizations are peeing in their shorts over listing syndication and erosion of the good old boy network.  Internet tools are developing at a dizzying pace. Better IDX IDL gateways, listing syndication portals and alternatives to the traditional MLS are scaring the crap out of many MLS associations.

 

Tough noogies, I say.

 

If you can't play well with others, if you have to resort to stealing listing ownership by baiting brokers and agents with MLS access tools, wow. All I can say is that any pain and discomfort coming to firms like MRIS deserve every bit of pain they got coming to them. I applaud any alternative real estate listing portal that offers superior listing tools and gives BACK the "ownership" to the broker.  The broker should decide how, when and where he or she wants to market their listings.  Restricting free trade is the same stupid crap we saw with NAR in 2005 when they were busted by the DOJ for Sherman Anti Trust.  

 

I salute the RPR, Kayyah.com, Redfin.com and all of the alternatives like them.  American "can do," entrepreneurism, job creation, opportunity and making things easier through technology is what progress is all about. MRIS is clearly running scared and doing all it can to ensure it's own survival through shoddy business practices and stealing the rights away of listing ownership.

 

Tsk. Tsk. 

 

MRIS is well known for NOT playing well with others. With the upcoming MLS national pool of listings being tested by 43 participating MLS firms in a single repository, MRIS is not one of the participating MLS firms. Go figure. 

 

People like Frank of Frankly Realty has a cute website blog called "Wheel Estate." He uses YouTube to post videos of himself driving around Virginia and posts them to his blog. It's very effective and it works, which is why Frank keeps doing it. 

 

It's not a stretch of the imagination that if it were up to MRIS, they will want to own videos, too.  

 

So... what's your opinion of your local MLS?  Friend or Foe?  Do they play well with others?

 

Sound off and let me know...

 

Bart Wilson | As seen in Business Week

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