What's driving NAR's new Realtor Property Resource, (RPR) idea?

I have heard a lot of mixed reviews lately as we learn more and more about NAR's new Realtor Property Resource idea. I recently came across a A Forty-Year History of the MLS on another site that reminded me of days gone by. Remember when as a home buyer you could only get a list of homes for sale from a real estate agent who showed them to you in a giant beat up book? The PC made things a lot easier for Realtors but when the Internet took off, I think very few people in real estate were ready for how the industry was about to change.

The Internet has lead in an era of shared information between agents, brokers and home buyers and sellers. Let's face it, being a buyers agent has gotten a little easier as home buyers can weed through tons of houses on the Internet before they want to go out and see a few. Sure it's also easier to lose a buyer as they find a home on the Internet, stumble into an open house without you and are accosted by an overly aggressive agent who tells them how surprised he/she is that they are house shopping without you. But for the really good buyers agents this doesn't happen very often. I haven't been able to find too many agents over the past 10 years who haven't been able to improve their business as a result of the Internet and the plethora of free information available to home buyers and sellers.

So with that in mind the question that comes up is "why would we want to go back to the old days of tightly controlled data"? In my experience control freaks usually operate from a base of fear. Is it possible that the NAR with their super powerful lobby and all are afraid of losing control of their loosely held real estate information empire? Wait a minute, they don't control the real estate info at the local level, your local and/or regional real estate board does and they share it through the local or regional MLS. So maybe it's not a matter of fear of loss but in fact the RPR is a product of a desire for gain. Who wouldn't want to control and distribute all the real estate data in the US, think of what that would be worth. Oh but they say it will be for Realtors only, that makes me feel a lot better and I'm sure that after they sucker in all the local and regional boards and their MLS data that they don't have any plans to deploy a public facing version. Ya think?

Frankly it doesn't really matter to me whether the RPR get's launched or not, but I'm curious about what you think about the RPR. Is this something that will help real estate agents grow their business or just another hair brained idea thought up by a bunch of dinosaurs? Feel free to leave a comment.

MLS helps shorten the time it takes to find a home.

Back in the old days the only way to find a home for sale was to drive around in your car until you found a “For Sale” sign, or call a Realtor and wait for them to call you with what they found for you. Not the worst system in the world but it took a lot of time and the home shopper had little control over the process.

Today’s savvy internet home shoppers have found a fast and easy way to shop for homes, it’s called the MLS or Multiple Listing Service and it allows home shoppers to input the criteria they are interested in like, price range, number of bedrooms, number of bathrooms, square foot, style of home, etc., and the MLS web site will return every home for sale that matches their search. The home buyer has complete control over what they see and when they can see it as it is available on the internet for free and they control the search criteria.

Now when you call a Realtor to help you buy a home, you can give them the list of homes you have already found and ask them to make appointments to show you those houses.

MLS Maps has created a national directory of mls listings to make it even easier to find the home you are looking for. When you visit www.mlsmaps.com you are within 3 clicks of almost every mls listing in the US. It’s fast, easy and free and you can also research schools, cities and counties.

The Zillow Quandry

OK so Zillow is getting a bunch of traffic, that's a fact but the question for Realtors is what kind of traffic is Zillow getting and how can it help me? Is Zillow getting hits from potential home buyers, potential home sellers or simply from people who are curious about the value of their home? Oh by the way, there is another big user of Zillow, mortgage professionals who use Zillow to determine if there is enough value in a borrowers home to justify a refinance. I'm thinking a lot of mortgage guys are using Zillow everyday which really doesn't help Realtors or home sellers.

My take on the deal is that most of Zillow's traffic is from people who are curious about the value of a home versus someone actually looking for homes to buy. Think about it, any home buyer that has heard the term MLS and has searched for their local mls in Google has figured out that the mother lode of homes for sale is not on Zillow, Trulia or sites like them who are busy trying to build a national database of home inventory, but on the sites of local realtors. So to think of Zillow as a great place to find buyers is a bit of a stretch. I haven't spent any time looking at Zillows Q&A section yet and in fact there might be some opportunities for agents to engage prospects in meaningful conversations that ultimately end in real estate transactions, but this is the same activity that Realtors are being told they should be doing with their blogs.

So what's an agent to do and how much time should an agent spend on Zillow and, what is Zillows ultimate motive in all this? Time will tell but knowing what I know about real estate and the Internet today, As an agent I would be spending my time build my web presence/brand in my local market using tools like a blog and an IDX broker reciprocity feed which gives my visitors access to almost all the homes for sales in their area. At the end of the day, the agent is still the one who makes it all happen!