After about five months of work with almost 20 of the leading MLSs in the U.S., we're really excited to announce the formation of the MLS Domains Association. You can see the press release on the Association's web site.
I started this project by approaching leading MLSs with a strategic vision for what an MLS top-level domain on the Internet could be. (Think of internet addresses like www.Maine.MLS and www.Chicago.MLS, but for use only by MLSs.)
Please visit the Association's web site and read the press release; there will be posts here and on the association's web site in the coming days providing more detail.
Let me know what you think!
-Brian
(Disclosure: As our consulting firm was paid to help create the association and is helping to manage it during its first couple months of existence, I am hardly unbiased where this project is concerned. If you read upcoming posts, you'll see that I am strongly in favor of this idea, though as always open to contrary points of view.)
Monday, March 29, 2010
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7 comments:
wonder what major league soccer will have to say, go to yahoo and type in mls major league soccer comes up too.
Key question: would the MLS tld be used for a) agent/broker access to the MLS, and/or b) for building public MLS sites?
As a broker providing the content to the MLS, I'm very much opposed to public MLS sites competing with our brokerage site. Why would I support the MLS using our fees to create a tld that we can't use?
Now, if the content providers to the MLS (brokerages) have access to the tld I might support my fees going to fund this endeavor, and it would make the whole thing more economically viable.
Why doesn't the proposal include the ability for my brokerage to register:
my-brokerage-trademark.mls
FYI, I choose to remain Anonymous for fear of retribution from my MLS.
Wait, let me get this straight.
With a VOW, a broker can have all the MLS data and provide it to the public.
A public MLS site doesn't have nearly as much MLS data that a VOW has.
But somehow the public MLS site has rights to use the myhometown.mls, but I can't use littlebrokerwithabigsite.mls?
And somehow the MLS is going to prevent me from marketing my VOW as being able to "Search the MLS" while putting up even less of the MLS at myhometown.mls?
What's up with that?
I believe these posters make some valid points. I also have a problem with what I see as a power grab by MLSs. An MLS should be nothing more than a database IMO. Members (brokers) who create the listings should be the only source of listing information derived from that database. I also posted anonymously because of what I perceive to be targeting by my MLS in the past.
Anonymous 1: We are not aware of an effort by Major League Soccer to obtain .MLS as a TLD.
Anonymous 2: The question of MLSs operating consumer-facing listing sites is still controversial. I've written elsewhere of my skepticism regarding them. But several of the MLSs involved in the MLS Domains Association project do not operate public-facing listings sites. They might still find a .MLS address useful for (a) the password-access system they provide for their broker/agent subscribers, and (b) a regional landing-page designed to hand consumers off to broker IDX or VOW sites. The MLS Domains Association has not taken any position on whether MLSs should or should not have consumer-facing listing sites; that's up to each market.
At present, there are no plans to permit addresses like "ABCRealty.MLS" - a single broker is, by definiton, not an MLS.
Little: How much more data is available on a VOW than on a hypothetical MLS site is a matter of local policy. For example, one of our MLS clients (it does not have a consumer-facing listings site), makes pretty much everything in the MLS database avaialable for display in IDX. VOWs in the market have only a couple additional fields and expired and withdrawn listings. There are a couple fields in that MLS's database that cannot be displayed on any web site.
A broker site might also show data that is not in MLS. "Office exclusive listings" and the like can appear on your VOW/IDX site; how they appear depends, again, on local policy.
Regardless of the precentage of MLS data available on a VOW or IDX or whether it shows listings not in MS, such a site is not the MLS, and a search on that site is may be a search of "data from the MLS" but is not a "search of the MLS."
Anonymous 3: I don't agree with the "MLS should be only a database" comment, but I think that's a good topic for a future blog post. As for the idea that brokers "who create the listings should be the only source of listing information derived from that database" - I agreed more strongly with that concept before the days of listing syndication.
My personal belief is that MLSs should serve brokers. Like all business tools, a .MLS TLD could be used to serve brokers or abused to dis-serve brokers; but it is another tool for MLSs, regardless.
Thanks for your comments!
-Brian
Brian: The MLS Domains Association SHOULD take a position AGAINST the MLSs using the tld for consumer-facing websites.
If an MLS is going to prevent brokers from using domain names containing "mls" because IDX/VOW doesn't contain the entire MLS, the MLS must play by the same rules itself since public-facing MLS sites don't have the entire MLS either.
My guess public-facing MLS sites are the primary motivation for the MLS domain association. Real estate agents know where to find the real MLS. There is no need for a .mls domain to help Realtors find the MLS they use every day!
Brokers: unless the charter expressly prohibits use of the .mls tld for public facing MLS sites, we must fight this use of OUR MLS FEES to create a very expensive domain we can't even use. We must also force our MLS to justify the business case for spending money on this - a case other than to create a public MLS site that competes with our brokerage sites.
First, my understanding is that the public facing sites of the MLS provide the leads to the listing agent and listing office. Does it really matter where your potential buyers come from?
Also, how can a small real estate office justify the fact that it is any better for them to get the leads of lets say 100 listings that belong to a single larger office when they only have 1 active listing themselves, but a "more effective" website?
If your MLS is "making a profit" off of a public facing website that is not helping the membership, then i would take issue. If they are just providing leads to the listing agent and listing office, where is the problem?
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