In the worst housing market we’ve seen in a lifetime, home buyers and sellers finally have some good news. Yesterday’s settlement between the Department of Justice and the National Association of Realtors (NAR) prevents Realtors from punishing online brokers, who often give consumers a discounted commission rate.
Under NAR’s rules, your listing broker could opt-out of allowing your home to be displayed on other brokers’ web sites. How that could possibly be in the seller’s best interests has never been explained. But under the settlement, NAR has to scrap these rules and avoid future discrimination against online brokers.
This settlement should encourage more innovation and competition for both buyers and sellers, driving down costs and complexities. Hopefully this case has been a wake-up call to traditional Realtors, who need to invest in technology and new ways of providing information and service to home buyers and sellers if they want to remain relevant in the future.
It could also be said that the NAR has won. The rule change that sparked the DOJ suit was to protect Realtors from new aggregation sites that were springing up. Today we might call it a mashup.
Over the period of the lawsuit agents have adjusted how they market and technology has continued to change. One view of the settlement is a draw was reached and the suit went away.
I am an investor and really do not care one way or the other. I do deals and help other investors. I enjoy how technology keeps changing the rules of the game. The threat today is not from aggregation sites as much as it is from internet savvy investors who market more successfully than many agents.
Posted by: John Corey | May 30, 2008 at 02:37 AM