MLS as a consumer portal.

Well pro's would be that agents who do not list on craigslist would get just as much traffic as the ones who dont. Buyer's and seller's would be able to know their own market. Wait a second these aren't necessarily pro's. They're Con's! If anyone can figure out what their home is worth, if anyone can access the mls to list their property then we cease to exist all together. All FSBO's would need would be to pay someone to input their listing bing bang boom we lose our most profitable tool as agents! We don't just lose buyers, we lose sellers! The main reason they want us is to know what thier home is worth! Ugh!

I dont' think our mls is working towards that, but I can see what the problem would be..

Houston Association of Realtors, HAR has their own consumer portal and in my opinion, it stinks.  I pay them and they give away what I pay for.

The public wants the information and that's fine, but they do not contribute the fees required to maintain the service nor do they contribute the data that makes up the service.  It's not a RIGHT to know this information...it's a service and I think the public should have to go through the SERVICE PROVIDER to get the service.  Doesn't that make sense?

Consumer loyalty is tough to find. I try to get buyers to understand that I can keep them better informed than if they were on their own.  Bonnie

I don't even see it as an option.  The majority of MLS providers in country allow their members to push data or frame searches from their own individual and company websites.  Further most MLS providers have agreements in place to push listing data out to sources like trullia, yahoo, google, homescape and a dozen others.  I would rather have my MLS create a good reliable source for consumers to search than for them to go to other websites, pull incorrect and usually imcomplete data and then I spend twice as much time trying to find the real data.

That being said the data released needs to be controlled and some information that we can see as agents is not for public distribution.  We just wne through a major redesign of our MLS system and changed providers, the whole discussion of what can be seen and what can be searched by the public was a hot one, but there never was an disgreement on wether or not the public could search at all.

One final issue ... cost.  Is your MLS prepared to spend the money and ongoing maintenance associated with maintaining a public portal, a server to handle the incoming volume, etc.  It can really add up. 

The horse is out of the barn, this is a good thing. You want consumers to come to your mls and ultimately your own listings as you said in the post. So just make sure your contact information is on it. Do you get a raw data feed.