The journey begins

Ok, did your homework and read the 42 initial pages (over achievers have read all 133 pages)? Ready to launch an expedition into the shadowy land of CHAOS where standardization seeks to cast a brilliant light into the wilderness thereby forcing diversity and creativity to cower in the dark recesses of cyberspace?

Oh, one last observation before we blast off--about the really nice message from the CTMLS President. Did we really expect the pres to diss the white paper fluff piece in a Preface? He did use the word "dialogue", suggesting differing opinions might exist, so here we go with some of that differing stuff.

Page ONE--Right outa the chute we get bludgeoned with:
"THE TRUTH OF OUR INDUSTRY(my caps--whose truth --LOL?)is that consolidation yields more comprehensive, accurate, timely and efficiently produced listing data. Anything less than consolidation on a statewide, or larger, scale burdens brokers and ultimately the public with LESS comprehensive, INaccurate, stale and more expensive listing data."

I'm going to dispute ALL of the above contentions during the next few blog posts--yes, even "comprehensive"--we'll need a dictionary and some semantics for that, but the point I'll make is worth the effort.

So up till now those of us working in the real estate industry and those buying and selling real estate have been, according to Cameron's white paper, living in a vast chaotic wasteland of overlapping, contentious MLS territories where stale, inaccurate, uncomprehensive and excessively expensive data is used doggedly by burdened brokers (particularly those who have multiple offices spreading out into different MLS areas)to eek out a modest existence. No surprise, the public is similarly burdened--even though they pay $50 Billion a year in commissions --- despite the alleged inefficiency and inadequacy of current MLS operations.

OMG! You guessed it. Things are even worse than that!

We (the industry) are also fragmented and divided, while we are assaulted by the barbarians attacking us on multiple fronts and deal with the perpetual stress of rampant fear and galloping paranoia. No mention of the lions coming over the hill--OR the camel sticking its nose into the tent--but with a mere 133 pages something had to get cut.

This scene sounds like it came from a movie about the dark ages! It's truly a miracle we survived. It's more amazing that tens of millions of buyers across the US managed to find housing and complete transactions with willing sellers, despite the stultifying handicap of these antiquated MLS operations? It's truly a miracle of impressive proportions.

Cameron paints a landscape showing a dark and woeful world of MLS madness that may have existed somewhere, sometime, but not often and certainly not where I did business from 1985-present. MLS members, volunteer leadership, paid staff and vendors made sincere efforts to achieve the shifting goals of the MLS and meet the needs of the public. They largely succeeded in a vast majority of markets, sometimes creating regional MLSs to expand services and market areas. To infer less in the process of moving an agenda forward shows a lack of respect for the industry, its heritage and those individuals.

I've mentioned in earlier Blogs that the national and state associations (at least the BIG state version out here on the left coast) played very little role in the day to day real estate business 25 years ago. More recently, if agents, brokers, and the public, were suffering mightily in the dark shadows of purported MLS oppression, one wonders why the trade organizations weren't struggling down a path toward consolidation much sooner? What changed over the past few years? Plenty, as you'll read in later posts!

Next: Whose data really is stale, inaccurate, incomplete, expensive AND inefficient?