Realtor-affiliated multiple listing services are getting another six months to deploy listing broker attribution and aggregated data feed policies passed in November.
At the National Association of Realtors’ annual conference last year, the trade group’s board of directors approved a policy to require the display of a listing broker’s phone number or email address next to listings on agent and broker websites.
The board also approved a policy that requires MLSs to offer their broker participants a single data feed for all of the uses for which they have authorization.
Both policies were among eight MLS policy changes the NAR board voted in at the conference.
The policies went into effect January 1 and MLSs were required to have implemented them by March 1, but that deadline has now been moved to September 1 for the listing broker attribution and single data feed policies only, Rodney Gansho, NAR’s director of engagement and longtime MLS policy guru, told the Multiple Listing Issues and Policies Committee Wednesday morning.
The committee met at the National Associaton of Realtors’ midyear conference, the Realtors Legislative Meetings in National Harbor, Maryland before a crowd of hundreds.
Rodney Gansho
“It wasn’t until after everything was approved that we started hearing some issues about implementation for some people,” Gansho said, noting that the trouble might be partially due to having to implement all eight changes at the same time.
“In response to that the NAR MLS advisory board had a special meeting to consider extending the implementation of some changes. The NAR leadership team also approved that extension.”
Gansho said MLSs should be working now with their vendors to make the changes by September 1.
“Don’t wait,” he said. “You have extra time. Take steps to get it done sooner rather than later.”
Gansho said he’d heard some “rumblings” that the policies are going to be reconsidered because of the extension.
“That is not true,” he said. “The extra timeline is there to help you.”
Afterwards, Gansho told Inman in an interview that some MLSs have already incorporated the changes and met the March 1 deadline, but others are having difficulty.
The listing broker policy requires agent and broker Internet Data Exchange (IDX) websites and Virtual Office Websites (VOW) to display “the email or phone number provided by the listing participant.”
Gansho said MLSs are having trouble with the process to capture the phone number and email address from the MLS participant and provide that in data feeds for display. MLSs must also educate brokers on what the policy means and what they have to do and work with vendors who are having difficulty taking that contact information and incorporating it into the display.
In regards to the data feed policy, MLSs are having trouble combining different data feeds into one data feed and must work with their vendors to do so, he said.
After the flurry of policymaking in the fall, NAR’s Multiple Listing Issues and Policies Committee did not consider any policy changes at the midyear meeting.
Jon Coile
While some MLS policy changes were suggested to the committee’s MLS Technology and Emerging Issues Advisory Board, which considers changes before forwarding them to the full committee, the board referred those suggestions to other workgroups they felt were more appropriate to consider them, according to the board chair Jon Coile.
He recommended that anyone interested in having the board consider an MLS policy change for the committee’s meeting at NAR’s annual conference in November reach out to Gansho now.
