More than 70 local brokers gathered on May 26th for MLSListings Broker Forum event in Foster City, CA to discuss the state of northern California real estate; emerging trends and technologies; and regional and national initiatives. Presentations included an overview of the new Realtors Property Resource™ (RPR) professional tool from the National Association of REALTORS®; an overview of the California Association of REALTORS (C.A.R.) and MLSListings new pilot program for REALTOR Ratings; and a keynote address from the WAV Group, an independent real estate consulting firm, presenting results from three national studies on broker perspectives.
MLSListings 2011 Board of Directors Chairman, Robert Bailey, moderated all of these presentations. During his introductory remarks, he addressed two important industry issues affecting brokers. They include the National Association of REALTORS® (NAR) new policy decision requiring Participants to authorize distribution of IDX information to their real estate franchise organizations (“franchisors”) to be indexed for display on franchisors’ websites, effective June 13, 2011; and a patent infringement lawsuit brought by CIVIX on four patents involving location-based search services used by the real estate industry.
MLSListings President and CEO, Jim Harrison, provided an overview of MLSListings’ implementation plan to meet NAR’s new, mandatory IDX authorization requirement, and Bailey gave a detailed overview of the impact of CIVIX’s claims, which are not limited solely to the real estate industry, and include industry giants Microsoft, Expedia, MOVE and other major companies.
Bailey also announced that NAR had negotiated a settlement with CIVIX to give blanket protection for MLSs and the industry as a whole from patent infringement claims. Under the settlement terms, if an MLS signs the agreement and pays their assessment, that MLS, its shareholder Associations, brokers and agents are protected. MLSListings Board of Directors voted unanimously to participate in the settlement to protect our brokers and agents—as well as our vendor Tarasoft—meaning full protection for MLSListings’ customers.
Following the introductory remarks by Robert Bailey, Dale Ross, Chief Executive Officer and Jeff Young, Senior Vice President of Operations from RPR previewed some of the new broker tool kit resources planned for release later this summer by RPR. Four separate tools will be made available to brokers:
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broker branding elements on RPR display and reports;
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affiliated service support will allow a brokerage to promote its affiliated companies, such as mortgage, title, home warranty, insurance or concierge to its agents and consumers;
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a management access only data tool for use in creating company-wide trend and forecasting reports for use with marketing strategies, business management and company sales analysis.
Beyond introducing these new tool sets, Dale Ross did an excellent job addressing NAR’s dues increase by explaining the need for the REALTOR political survival initiative: namely, the critical importance of its defense of the real estate industry and the potential overall economic impact of federal legislation – proposed and not yet proposed – affecting current and future homeowners and the overall stability of the housing market.
During the keynote luncheon address, Marilyn Wilson and Victor Lund, Founding Partners from the WAV Group presented industry findings from multiple surveys they gathered nationwide and locally regarding broker issues with MLSs. They shared broker sentiment and concerns from the Bay Area involving what appears to be dysfunction because of too many MLSs in the Bay Area.
Their research findings—based on 60 telephone-based interviews with top brokers in the greater Bay Area—expressed the brokers’ continued frustration with too many MLSs; too many conflicting MLS rules; and no standardization of the user interface or the data models from which brokers must acquire data for their websites. They also had significant concerns with the use of multiple lockbox systems in the region. On a positive note, the bulk of the survey respondents commended MLSListings and SFAR for providing “the best service among the six Bay Area MLSs” through a number of specific comments covered in the presentations made by the WAV Group.
The Broker Forum event concluded with a presentation made by Sara Sutachan, Senior Research Associate from C.A.R. and Larry Romito, CEO of Quality Service Certification, Inc. (QSC) about REALTOR Ratings. MLSListings is in a pilot with C.A.R. and QSC to offer a free ratings service, underwritten by C.A.R., to measure a REALTOR’S performance based on real reviews of homebuyer and seller clients. Sara gave a preliminary report on the program’s progress since launching it earlier this year with nine brokers, and Larry followed up with a demonstration on how the QSC system works and how it integrates fully with the MLSListings system.
MLSListings was pleased to offer this content-rich program, designed specifically for brokers. We look forward to hosting more of these events in the months ahead and into 2012.
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