Realtor.com granted 6 week reprieve

Last month, NWMLS, the MLS for Washington State and parts of Oregon, announced that its agreement with Realtor.com would terminate effective April 22, 2007. At that time, Realtor.com was in the process of sending members information about how they could continue to provide their listing information for publication on their website, but many had not received those communications and were not prepared to transition to a direct relationship with Realtor.com.

In order to ensure that members have enough time to make the transition, NWMLS and Realtor.com have agreed to extend the deadline until June 1, 2007. Realtor.com's Web site ( http://feeds.theenterprise.com ) has more information about the transition and contains a letter explaining the changes and a copy of the agreement that must be signed if brokers wish to continue to send their listings to Realtor.com on their own.

Washington State's largest real estate firm, Windermere Real Estate, has never sent its listings to Realtor.com anyway, so the site has been nearly useless in this state, and I expect it to become even more irrelevant as smaller brokers will not have the resources or inclination to enable a direct feed. With such a small percentage of listings available, clients and customers will become frustrated and turn directly to broker sites which feature an IDX feed from the NWMLS instead. Which, ultimately, is what brokers want clients to do anyway.

--Marlow Harris, www.360Digest.com

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