I was the other agent that addressed the NAR MLS Committee last Thursday.

And the Committee voted, unanimously I might add, to change the language of the policy to:

Participants must protect IDX information from unauthorized use. This requirement does not prohibit indexing of IDX sites by search engines.

This change was then approved by the NAR Executive Committee.

And then it went for final passage by the NAR Board of Directors. At that point, one of the Directors (not coincidentally a MIBOR representative) made a motion to table the vote and send the proposed change back to the MLS committee for “further discussion”.

And that’s exactly what happened.

“Further discussion” in this case means it won’t come up again until the committee meets in November — six months from now.

This is excellent progress as it means more brokers/agents will be able to apply basic Web marketing principles and gain ground in the SERPs. We used the Bruce Clay, Inc. blog this week to discuss this in depth and give advice to this SEO-starved industry. See http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/archives/2009/05/jumping_into_th_1.html for the complete scoop. And thanks for bringing this issue to our attention, Matt!

Realtor.com gets its data outside of the IDX rules, which NAR dictates.

Therefore, NAR can dictate anti-competitive IDX rules that hobble the SEO capabilities of IDX-powered sites that benefit Realtor.com and, collaterally, other sites that are not subject to IDX display rules, like Google,Yahoo, Trulia, and Zillow.

The irony is that this policy hurts only the members of NAR, and helps only those (Realtor.com included) who are trying to get into the pockets of NAR members.

Considering that they had to back down from the DOJ last year in a settlement over yet another kind of data feed (VOW for “Virtual Office Website”) you really have to wonder what the brain trust at NAR is thinking.

More at http://www.bloodhoundrealty.com/BloodhoundBlog/?p=8358

@Mike – I will definitely reach out to you. Thanks for the offer!

Not only is this stance inaccurate, but it is detrimental to the very people that real estate organizations are supposed to service – consumers. The internet has empowered us to search out the information we desire and having various competing options has been paramount to that success. In this case, not only are potential buyers adversely affected, but sellers are perhaps the biggest losers in all of this. If I’m selling my house through an agent, I want to know that everything is being done to expose my home to potential suitors. Blocking search engines from picking up this data limits that reach and forces buyers down a much smaller funnel.