RPR and Search Engine Truce are Big News at the National Association of Realtors Convention

Posted on November 17th, 2009 by admin

Last weekend was the big weekend at the National Association of Realtors convention. There is some pretty big news too. The NAR is taking the first steps towards a national multiple listing with their announcement of RPR or Realtors Property Resource.

The RPR will have data on over 150 million homes when it is launched in April of 2010. It has a user interface that reviews claim is very well done. Foreclosure data. Default stats. Interactive charts. Even sliders for users to adjust the market conditions as they see them. On top of that, there is a basic community/social function.

It will have a valuation function something like Zillow although the claim is it will be much more accurate. So far, it doesn’t have local MLS data. Until it has that it is pretty much a combination of information that is already available from other sources. But, if they can get the MLS data, they will have done a great deal to make real estate information truly available to the public. That, of course, is contrary to what the NAR has done forever where they try to protect their value behind information barricades. We’ll see what actually happens.

The business model of how this will work with local MLS systems is anything but clear. Here is a good article on some of the issues with RPR and MLS systems.

But, the good news is that the NAR, now that they will be doing it themselves, finally agrees that sites that index data, like Google, are not “scraper” sites. The IDX rules have been updated to explicitly allow indexing by search engines, defeating the Indianapolis BoR’s attempt to use the old rules to prevent brokers and agents from using IDX data in SEO.

John Rowles from Bloodhoundblog was at the NAR conference this weekend and has a good take on the issue. Greg Swan has another take on the whole development.