Michael Stuart

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Can we scape the national franchise sites and get all their listings or any other content we might like and put it on our sites? NAR is "whoring" out the local realtor's data more and more for its benefit and the benefit of large sponsors, with nothing in return for the local realtor, except an increase in dues to help pay for it.

NAR continues to "give away the gold" and diminish the value of local realtors. Local realtors [and their organizations] should seriously question being part of NAR - and consider adapting their boards for the changing times of technology and online real estate. The local boards should determine where and how they share the pooled listings data THEY own and create, and there is no longer any need for the local realtors [or their customers] to have the listings data on these national sites. Google (and all the major search engines) will easily index and find their sites for the local listing content, significantly increasing their search engine rankings. What would be of value for local realtors to have distributed nationally, is information about the qualities of their local area. My Rant

This is the most important issue for the Realtor community and the survival of local real estate agents. If you give away one of your primary assets with nearly no return, you loose. There is no longer any need to freely distribute listing content. Google can easily identify by local area the Realtor sites that contain the MLS data for that area. All links to the property data detailed information should arrive at a participating member of the local MLS. There should be no other way to see the details, but at a local Realtor site, who has the ability to answer questions about other aspects of the area and properties. The Realtor organization and local MLS should be providing the leadership and technologies to aggregate and analyze the MLS data - and therefore blow away any benefits of national aggregation. National level features should be category like directories and high-level summary information that always lead to the local MLS systems. Why are local Realtors paying dues and then paying for advertising and then paying for leads from so many different organizations and companies for their own data? It should be the other way around. Once most of the local Realtors are put out of business, the rich source of content that national parasites are living off of will dry up. the local expertise vanish and the consumer left without the valuable information they need to make an informed decision - and will be back to having to visit the local areas and seek out expertise, the local Realtor's will once again become appreciated. To avoid the pain of such a cycle, the national and local Realtor/MLS community should look at the issue from the value of the consumers and local agents. The two main ingredients for success in buying and selling real estate. The technology and procedures to properly handle the MLS data is still in the hands of the Realtor community. Wise up and leverage it, instead of giving it away to the demise of both the consumer and local agents.