Its unbelievable that the MLS is the best the industry and all the major brokerages can come up with. The only ones impresses are realtors….not consumers.

What is broken is the commission model. Buyer and Seller commissions should be split. Agents across America should not be asked to represent buyers without compensation for their services. Buyers should not be allowed to take advantage of free services that they perceive to be their right. Make them pay for the services they receive (consultation/education, research, showings, etc…), we will have more serious buyers. Reduce the selling price by the amount of the selling agents commission and roll the buyers commission expense into their loan. End result, even Steven, and the agent is paid for consultative services whether there is a sale or not. Nobody works for free, Realtor’s should not be expected to either.

Case in point. A small MLS on the coast of NC is notorious for being very difficult to deal with. Last year, in an effort to force agents to use the MLS’s own solution, they made it economically very difficult for outside vendors to come in and make use of the data. Competition was stymied. This hurt the MLS’s customer, the agent and in turn hurt the agent’s customer, the buyer and seller. It did this by limiting where and how the information got presented.

As far as mobile goes. Yes we are seeing quite a bit of innovation. I think this is because like social media, the technology has moved much faster than the gatekeepers (MLS) have been able to digest. They were carried along by the wave instead of building dams to block the flow much like we have seen on the desktop.

The three big things I have seen that have happened in real-estate these last couple of years are; mobile, list aggregators like ListHub, and Google. I think it will just get better as Google continues to mashup all the data they have into a cohesive platform where you can find anything and see everything.

As I’ve been saying my while caree…realtors don’t get it. Selling homes isn’t about the realtor and what they think is good…it’s all about what consumers think and ultimately think of us. Consumers are talking, but no one listening.

Any efficiency gained by standard data formats would be efficiency gained by making it easier to consolidate MLSs. If the systems can’t talk to one another, agents who work near borders must belong to more than one. If they can they need only belong to one. What is the compensating factor, from the MLS point of view, of incurring the cost of transitioning their systems to a new standard? How does it gain them fees? It don’t. It might happen if enough MLSs feel threatened by something like a RPR.

During the data standards panel, we discussed how similar efforts are occurring right now in many other parts of the country as well, which begs the question as to how a national group like RESO could or should step to the plate with a national standard. Either way, there are groups like COVE (about 20 of the largest MLSs in the country) that are working hard on standards and that will result in progress in the coming years.

Which leads me to another point I made during the MLS Re-Boot panel: We’re all often impatient with the rate of change because we lack a proper perspective on the total arc of change. Because I just returned from the chiropractor, I’ll use that as an example. The pain in my lower back is from years of lack of care, and that’s not going to be corrected overnight. It takes time and patience, and, importantly, such patience is a lot better than the alternative of surgery.

Lastly, another potentially useful analogy for the MLS is Facebook. Slashdot just reported on how Facebook’s customer satisfaction is “abysmal”, in part because Facebook changes their terms of use frequently. Similarly, the cooperation in content creation by the MLS is due to a solid understanding of what can and will be done with the content, and so changing the rules needs to happen with care so as not to disrupt the cooperation that created the value in the first instance.

You raise a good question about whether or not offer of compensation is a prerequisite for continued cooperation. I am not sure what the answer is either, but my sense is most MLS execs view it as their “secret sauce,” which I think is risky.

As for standards, why, in your opinion, have we seen so little movement there? What’s the argument against a true standard?