Silly MLS IDX Rules

I read some stuff the other day about how the talented crew over at Estately recently launched into the Portland, OR market, and one of the stupid MLS rules (my opinion) they had to face triggered some memories of frustrations I had faced when I loaded the Portland data into our own IDX system. I’ll quote directly from the RMLS (Oregon MLS) rules themselves.

(Rule III.13) Address fields are included in the IDX data set for the sole purpose of facilitating mapping functionality. The addresses of property must not be viewable (and may not be printable) on or from any IDX website.

How unfortunate, and really, what’s the point? Is the point to protect the house from the squatters who use their laptop with it’s high-speed Internet connection to search for their next place to squat? Maybe the rule is in place to prevent the next door neighbors from performing an address search on Estately to find out that your house is in foreclosure. Actually, I bet they have the rule in place just because RMLS thinks it would be funny to frustrate buyers who just want to live on a particular street.

Okay, okay, I know. The rule is in place so that buyers can’t just search for properties on a website and then go for a drive to take a look at the properties themselves. Basically, easily displayable information is intentionally withheld from potential buyers in order to facilitate a business model that prizes information asymmetry and requires potential buyers like myself to essentially waste someone’s time to find out the information required to see a property with my own eyes. I know that there’s probably a lot of agents out there who want to egg my car for saying that while other agents would defend me, but hey, it’s just the way a lot of people in my generation (Generation Y) feel.

The best (worst?) part about the rule is that it only applies to “any IDX website”. Does that mean it’s okay to show the address in our RSS feeds? How about our property update emails? What about the printable brochures that don’t have to be part of the IDX website? If we’re allowed to show addresses in any of those venues as an IDX vendor (as the rule reads), then what’s the point of making the site harder to use if the information is available if the user just looks hard enough? We’ve loaded in IDX data from over 40-something of the largest markets in the US now, and RMLS is the only MLS that we’ve encountered who’s had that rule

Anyway, enough of picking on RMLS. Let’s take a jab at some other rules that we’ve encountered in our travels.

• NorthStar MLS (coincidentally enough, they also refer to themselves as RMLS):

  “Once during each viewing session of the BRS’s web site, the BRS’s web site must require the visiting consumer to assent to the terms of the “End-User License Agreement for consumers accessing public MLS and broker web sites, including Broker Reciprocity sites” (the “EULA”), promulgated by the Service. The BRS’s web site must obtain the consumer’s assent by means of the consumer’s affirmative act before the consumer views any portion of the Broker Reciprocity Database.”

  Are they serious? Yes, deadly serious. Here’s their EULA (Word doc) that all visitors are expected to read in its entirety and consent to before searching. No other MLS requires this.

• A handful of MLSs require us to put their logo on every single property. Most MLSs require us to display some sort of broker reciprocity logo on listings that aren’t owned by the agent or broker who is using the IDX, and I understand that, but what’s the point of putting the MLS’s logo on every single listing? We’re trying to encourage people to remember and contact the agent or broker, not remember what the MLS’s logo looks like.
• Realcomp (Detroit) requires us to display the school district on every single listing and in all of the search results. I understand that it’s nice to know, but it’s very odd to me that they consider it to be so important for people to know as to be codified into their IDX rules. No other MLS requires this.
• Three MLSs mandate that we don’t show the number of days that the property has been on the market. Redfin and others have worked around this by calling the number “Days on Redfin” instead of “Days on Market”. Again though, if there are workarounds, what’s the point?
• MetroList in northern California required us to remove all logos from our IDX solution. It’s not a big deal at all — it’s just weird is all. None of the other MLSs mentioned it.

There are bunch of other aggravating rules we’ve encountered, but you probably get the point by now. I really love what I do, and it’s actually quite enjoyable to search each new MLS that we load into our system, but sometime’s it feels like we hit the negative lottery (to quote from The Death of Common Sense) each and every time we load in a new IDX feed. Speaking of The Death of Common Sense, I think there’s a couple of MLS execs, lawyers, and compliance-checking employees out there who probably need to read that book as well.