Online discount real estate brokers can now enjoy complete access to the nation’s Multiple Listing Service thanks to an antitrust lawsuit by the Department of Justice.
The New Hampshire legislature has reached a tentative agreement on the state’s Online Safety Act.
City councilors in Tulsa want to consider new legislation for the secondary ticket market and make it illegal to scalp tickets.
A proposed federal law that would place extensive regulations on technology companies doing business in China and other nations is deemed to be unreasonable "Internet-restricting."
The Justice Department announced to online real estate brokers, and potentially their clients, by forcing new industry policies that give Internet-based agents access to home listings they were previously denied.
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.
Baltic President is labeling the cyber attacks on his country as part of an organized crime effort in an interview he conducted with Radio Free Europe. He also inferred the geopolitical implications this will create if another country was the perpetrator behind the denial of service attacks.
The Arkansas Attorney General ruled that ChoicePoint has agreed to pay $500,000 to settle an action brought by 44 states, including Arkansas, over a data security breach. The personal information of 163,000 people was sold to identity thieves in the incident.
Internet taxes could be coming soon due to political groups urging lawmakers to enact law allowing states and cities to collect taxes on purchases made on the internet despite origin or destination of sale.
Realtors are beginning to embrace the Internet because of its reach, according to the
Peoria Journal Star.
The Tennessee Legislature has joined ten other states in passing a law that makes it illegal for real estate brokers to share their commissions with home buyers. That may not sound like a big deal, but it represents yet another sneak attack by traditional Realtors on innovative online discount brokers. Rebating part of their commission to a buyer is one way online brokers save their clients money and compete with traditional brokers on price.
You do the math. Three percent of a $750,000 purchase price comes to $22,500, and a one-third rebate comes to $7,500—enough to furnish an entire room of your new home. But traditional Realtors stubbornly insist on keeping it all for themselves. And the Realtors are clearly not above playing politics in order to twist the law in their favor.
In the long run, however, fighting the future is usually a big mistake. The National Association of Realtors (NAR) is already facing antitrust charges, while our Justice Department (DOJ) and the Federal Trade (FTC) commission continue to criticize NAR's anti-competitive practices.
We are quoted extensively in the joint FTC-DOJ report on "Competition in the Real Estate Brokerage Industry" that is critical of NAR, and we appeared in a recent CBS 60 Minutes story about the NAR's efforts to squash online discount brokers.
Meanwhile, buyers and sellers alike are gravitating to online brokers, not just to save money, but also because searching the Internet is a lot more convenient than driving from house to house with a real estate agent. Realtors are fighting a losing battle if they insist on preventing technology innovation and the price competition that will naturally follow. Instead, Realtors should embrace these trends, or they risk losing their lucrative business to the likes of Google and Zillow.com, outsiders who could rewrite the rules of real estate.
The National Association of Realtors (NAR) is having its mid-year convention in Washington this week, and the Realtors should have quite a lot to talk about. The Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department issued a joint report last week taking a critical look at the state of competition in the real estate business. I'm quoted several times in the report talking about the impact of the Internet.
And I appeared last night in a “60 Minutes” story looking at the growth of online discount brokers and NAR's continuing attempts to crush Internet competition. I talked about my experience as a founder of eRealty, one of the first online discount brokerages targeted by NAR's new rules. These “competition prevention” rules are still the subject of an anti-trust lawsuit filed against the NAR by the Justice Department.
It didn’t make the broadcast, but in my actual interview with Leslie Stahl, I warned Realtors to allow more innovation and price competition in their own ranks or risk losing their lucrative business to increasing competition from non-Realtors who don't have to follow NAR rules. That’s a message that all Realtors need to hear, and I’d deliver the message personally if I thought it was safe for me to crash their convention.
The Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice are out with a new joint report looking into competition in the real estate industry, including the impact of the Internet. The report quotes me in several places about my role at eRealty.com, a startup that was crushed by National Association of Realtors (NAR) rules. Meanwhile, the CBS news magazine 60 Minutes is doing a story this Sunday (May 13, 7pm EDT) about the NAR and its campaign against internet-based business models that discount commissions. I'll be appearing in the piece, and in my interviews I urge the Realtors to allow innovation and price competition in their own ranks, or risk losing their lucrative legacy business to competition from non-Realtors who don’t have to follow NARs rules.
