MIBOR and NAR need an internet education

I have watched a situation unfold that disturbs me greatly. MIBOR and NAR (that would be the National Association of Realtors and Metro Indianapolis) have turned a complaint (apparently from a competitive REALTOR) against several other REALTORS into a decision in Indianapolis that could change the shape of online real estate marketing. To wit:

Agent Genius broke the story (written by one of the affected realtors, Indianapolis REALTOR Paula Henry).  Please read the story before continuing. It is  important. Please read the comments by Jay Thompson. I totally agree with his take on this. NAR and MIBOR are tying the hands of REALTORS whilst freeing 3rd party lead aggregators to take over. Joe Lane echoed those thoughts about NAR and MIBOR on Active Rain.

Further details were added by Morgan Carey on his blog about his conversations (as the webmaster of two of the sites RedDoorIndy and HometoIndy)with NAR and MIBOR. (see that link as well). There were other borkerage sites affected that are not sites that Morgan’s company created. In Morgan’s post  I found NAR’s  misuse of the word scraping to be par for the course, sad to say. Google is NOT a scraper, Google is (essentially) the librarian of the internet. Morgan did a great job of explaining it and (in my opinion) NAR simply does not get it. Scrapers TAKE content. The librarian (Google) simply indexes it. (think: card catalog)

To force members of your organization to deindex pages from the internet library in my estimation is not unlike the decision to burn books at the real library because you find they are offensive to your beleifs or you are afraid of what they teach.

I don’t beleive in that.

Further, it is also bad for business. Google is going to ALLOW quality information to be published. AS THEY SHOULD. As Joe Lane indicated in his post, this will leave NAR members vulnerable to the likes of Trulia and Zillow for internet control of many of the long tail searches that people search for. Why? For the sake of ‘fairness”? Please.

Trulia and Zillow must be smiling while they watch the idiots at MIBOR try to legislate fairness by giving away the store to one third party after another.

In the comments on the AgentGenius post, NAR’s social media person, Todd Carpenter indicated that “maybe it wasn’t so bad for NAR to make it harder for the non listing agents site to rank for these terms.”

Special note to Todd. I have 110 agents (in the office where I work as a technologist) that pay dues that pay your salary. 50% of the deals they do are the selling side and NOT the listing side. If you are gonna be the NAR social media dude…PLEASE realize that buyer’s agents pay for 50% of your salary. Please let NAR in on that little secret as well.

Todd if you do not understand that concept, please resign before stepping on half of the people that pay you again. It is infuriating that you apparently do not get this. You are a nice guy, but favoring 50% of the REALTORS over the other half?

NAR is now left with no good choices.

Perhaps the best choice for the real estate industry as a whole is to do away with them (NAR). Google is a much better librarian than NAR and MIBOR EVER were at being judge, jury and executioner.