'The Lions are Here and They're Eating Our Lunch'

Alan Yassky, a National Association of Realtors representative to Move Inc.'s board of directors (Move operates Realtor.com through a contract with NAR), put a new twist on the infamous and oft-cited speech delivered by Bill Chee in 1993 that has come to be known as the "Lions Over the Hill" speech -- and he threw in a gorilla reference, to boot.

Chee, then president president of the Realtor trade group, said in his April 26, 1993, address to the group's directors, "I view the current MLS situation as a few chihuahuas fighting over a bone, unaware that a hungry lion is coming over the hill," and challenged Realtors to "become the lion."

Yassky, who addressed the group's directors Saturday in Washington, D.C., said, he ate dinner with Chee the night before "and I said to him, 'Billy, they're not coming over the hill anymore. We're living among them. The lions are here and they're eating our lunch. And it's like this 800-pound gorilla in the room -- he does whatever he wants to do.'"

Referring to Google, Yahoo and other Internet players that seek to display property information to their massive online audiences, Yassky cautioned the real estate industry about agreements they sign to share property data. "You guys giving your listings away and not knowing where the hell they're going -- what are you doing? It will scare the hell out of you what you are authorizing people to do."

Google approached Move Inc. about the company's property listings content, he said, "and we said, 'We'll give it to you with three exceptions.'" Those exceptions, which he said were not acceptable to Google, related to contractual agreements with NAR dictating specific content requirements for property listings and preventing the display of FSBO listings, for example.

NAR's CEO, Dale Stinton, also invoked the "Lion Over the Hill" speech in an earlier presentation to NAR directors when he quoted Chee: "We must make ourselves such a valuable resource, that no one -- no vendor, no buyer, no seller -- will see any benefit in bypassing the Realtor family."

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