MLS gets SAD and REALTORS Wither Further

I never ceases to amaze me. With the industry in turmoil – real turmoil meaning homes aren’t selling, credit is harder to come by even for good borrowers and silly groups like the Austin City Council trying to kill local real estate with local environmental-efficiency upgrades before permitting a house to sell – the REALTOR industry just keeps shooting itself in the foot. Never mind a weak dollar, shaky lenders and foreclosures undermining the markets in the states with the largest economies in the country – FL, NY, NV, and of course, California. Don’t worry about the changing generations of buyers disrupting the comfy-cozy medieval guild system we used to call the real estate business. And as for new third parties like Trulia and Zillow, they aren’t even on the radar of really disrupting the business, considering how easily they were co-opted into playing nice with the big franchisors.

Nope: Just leave it to the local MLS system to put the final nails into the coffin of good old real estate.

That’s just what’s happening in San Diego this morning, as Kris Berg, a local REALTOR and member of Prudential California reports this morning in a wonderful article (written as an open letter) on the Inman News site today (See the article or her personal blog or trackback link).

Here are just a couple of my favorite highlights, written with a wit after my own heart:

To better serve me, you recently gave me a new MLS system. You call it Tempo 5. I am writing to thank you. Although I never asked for my former and, dare I say, functional MLS to be replaced, you seemingly knew exactly what my clients and I needed….

…[S]ome bad apples were sharing their [old MLS access] with unauthorized evildoers… so I get the whole “key fob” thing … My new Security Authenticator, as you call it, is really neat. … Now no one except me can input or update my listings, including my partner, my assistant and the other agents on my team. Sometimes I can’t even update my listings…

… I love how adding a listing now involves 219 distinct input fields. While only 111 of these are mandatory, you can bet I am going to use every one….

[And my personal favorite section of her letter...]

… Now, I can’t highlight and right-click statistical reports anymore, but that’s OK. Why would I need to share this proprietary data with my clients on my Web site or blog when they can just go to Zillow? It’s our MLS, after all. Let them go find their own IDX feed and figure it out themselves!

How is it that REALTORS are still hand-wringing over the “security” of their MLS database? Hello?!?! The issue is dead. Moot. Move on! Your data is out there, gone over the ether, on any screen, in any Blackberry, spread around like to much manure it really represents (The quality of MLS data is insanely poor. Berg notes that she’s looking forward to seeing the new listing with 3000 bathrooms she just found in the MLS. And everyone knows how few photos most MLS contains. And we’re worrying about the security of this information???)

And what’s with this “security authenticator” device. I think we should make up an acronym for it: SAD. It’s just so sad that REALTORS are “fighting the good fight” against MLS data piracy, when they still haven’t figured out how to price homes to sell, stage them to show properly – or how just take their laptops to an open house so buyers can ask more questions and REALTORS can provide answers more than “I’ll have to get back to you…”

Sheesh. Of all the problems we have in this business – ANOTHER MLS SECURITY UPGRADE doesn’t seem like it’s of PARAMOUNT ISSUE, now, does it?

Well, of course it is! Especially to “committee members” who aren’t busy doing anything else right now (like selling homes or marketing online). It’s the same old story: Some old-school REALTORS think they’re losing control over their data. Quick – lock it down! Get a security guard! Bite, Fido, bite! Protect that data – because heavens forbid the consumer actually see it! What might happen then?

So the security device is really perfect: It’s a SAD reaction to a SAD strategy for being relevant in the modern real estate marketplace. Save the MLS! Save the data! Save the Alamo….. Ooops. That one didn’t work out so well, now, did it?

Believe it or not, there is a serious business analysis of this very situation. Let’s channel our inner-Drucker for a moment and we’ll quickly discern:

“Computers may have done more harm than good by making managers even more inwardly focused. Executives are so enchanted by the internal data the computer generates–and that’s all it generates so far, by and large–that they have neither the mind nor the time for the outside. Yet results are only on the outside. I find more and more executives less and less well informed (about the outside world).”

This is absolutely the trap of the “MLS-data-security-SAD” paradox that the San Diego Association of REALTORS (and many other Associations) find themselves in. They are focused on the “computer” and “the data” and “security” – all of which is simply “internal stuff.” And internal processes are only costs and efforts. Never profits. Only on the outside – in the world of the consumer, who can desire our products (our data) and compensate us for it – can profits be made.

Ironically, “securing the MLS data” is like “locking profits” outside of the REALTOR community.

Well, it’s not unexpected. At least not for us here at our company. The Security Authenticator Device is just another last-ditch effort to keep change at bay. The last gasps of outrage before the wheels of change grind it all beneath their awesome power.

Alas, the San Diego REALTORS will give it one more try: To hold on to the pre-industrial days of real estate – when every brokerage was a little cottage dotting the serene hills of a managed mercantalist marketplace. Back then, not a factory – or internet connection – was in sight to thwart the local guild with things like efficiency, immediacy or competition. In the good old days, only the “initiated few” had access to the secret comparables book of properties. Even advertising to the public was done in cryptic codes like “2BR, 3BA, LgFmRm” so that the un-anointed consumer would be forced to seek the help of a keeper of the secrets. And lo and behold! Should any of the secret society ever let a consumer touch the book – or access the MLS database – blue bolts from Heaven should strike him down with fines and sanctions. He might even be expelled from the Society of Book Keepers and MLS Preservers – a pariah forever.

It’s so sad: The last ditch effort of the REALTOR MLS is about as “medieval” as one might imagine. Is it just me, or does the “Security Authentication Device” remind anyone else of an old voodoo talisman?

Yeah, that’s going to work wonders against the internet, don’t you think?