Just as a gentle reminder to all of what the actual purpose of the National Association of Realtors is supposed to be:
"The core purpose of the NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF REALTORS® is to help its members become more profitable and successful." You can see that here.
Prior to reading this post – which most internet-savvy Realtors have now read – I didn’t know what "indexing" was and didn’t care. That was something I only learned in the comments section of that post. So I now ask, Is it possible that Paula was wrong to allow search engines to find all of those listings on her site and for Google to index them? Is it possible? Really, isn’t it possible? Well it must be possible, some people at NAR already thought it was wrong and Paula’s local association leaders also seemed to think it was wrong. Do I personally think that a "no indexing rule" would be such a horrible bad thing? If no one, no company could index listings?
It would be alright with me if Realtor.com wasn’t allowed to do it. But Realtor.com is allowed to do it. And they are also allowed to use terms like "MLS" in their meta words. All of the listings on Realtor.com can be found by Google and indexed. Because some people at NAR (who couldn’t see around corners, even a little bit) originally gave away the name, "Realtor.com" to a for-profit company instead of making it a member benefit we now have LOADS of other places that have our listings out there to be indexed. Trulia, Zillow (and a growing list of other sites with MLS feeds) are all allowed to have the listings available for indexing. These are all companies that would not even exist if it weren’t for NAR’s original mishandling of Realtor.com. Is NAR going to stop them? Could NAR stop them? Is NAR going to stop Realtor.com from allowing listings to be indexed?
This past week in Washington D.C. it looked for a brief moment like sanity would prevail. In the end it didn’t. Can anyone (elected or paid staff) at NAR, on any committee or in any position explain how this makes even a little bit of sense? Or are you going to try to ignore this issue by justifying it with, "It will be taken up by the committee in November"?
Why would it be okay with you for public – for profit companies – to have the right to freely do something that Realtors are then prevented from doing? What twisted, tortured logic is used to justify that?
Anyone?