The NAR Gateway – Preliminary report released
It's been talked about for some time, on and off-line. For consumers - this means that perhaps, eventually you may the one location for all property information - one place to search for homes. No more going to multiple sites to try and get the…
Realtors spend too much time discrediting Lawrence Yun
What a shame that we have to spend so much time and effort on- and off-line answering the National Association of Realtors' economist's "predictions." Noah is spot on: The NAR has unsuccessfully predicted housing trends for 70% of 2007! For the past 9 months, count…
The NAR Gateway inches out of the box
Read it in today's Inman before it goes behind the pay wall. "We think that there is a demand by practitioners wanting to have all the data they can, and having a database that has all properties throughout the country and is as deep and…
Define “readily apparent” for consumers
So the light blogging lasted four hours. The National Association of Realtors has either gone too far or not far enough with their ambiguous dictate: (read it quickly before it goes behind Inman's subscription wall) Directors amended an article in the NAR Code of Ethics…
Add MLS Data to the mix, and you’ve got a winner
Thanks to the Lost Remote, I came across this story from Northwestern University's Readership Institute site that unintentionally makes the parallel between how Realtors think of MLS data (we want to keep it in a box, and control access). One of the most striking developments…
Cyberhomes and Realtor.com
Cyberhomes has Realtor.com in their cross-hairs. For the real estate buyers/sellers/consumers in the Charlottesville area - which site has better, more useful data, and data display, for your house? Realtor.com has the current listing data: But Cyberhomes has more data, and is working on acquiring…
Realtors working against themselves
Look no further than this, on the Virginia Association of Realtors' page (I didn't see it yesterday because I use Adblock Plus on Firefox). Homegain charges a 35% referral fee for every "lead" that turns into a transaction. I've used Homegain on and off for…
And you wonder why NAR is suffering a credibility problem?
Look no further than this analysis. It was great theater. Each month the NAR could be counted on for denial, cheerleading, and blind stupidity. When the NAR ended up with a new, somewhat less-hallucinogenic chief economist, I was actually a bit disappointed.
Yet another reason to dislike Realtor.com
In order to serve my clients, I have to pay significant amounts of money to have more than one picture on Realtor.com. In order to publish my listing content on Realtor.com, which is supposed to be for the benefit of both Realtors and Move.com's shareholders…
The MLS conversation expands
One of my greatest sources of aggravation regarding the NAR MLS PAG is this: ... he said he is largely in the dark about an NAR-created MLS Future presidential advisory group that is studying the feasibility for creating a national real estate data repository, also…