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No more web sites in the remarks section? ARMLS drops the hammer on the one little bit of the 21st century it was getting right
By: Greg Swann,
BloodhoundBlog.com
Posted: Thursday, March 6th, 2008, 12:41 pm MST
Category: General Information
I read about the outlawing of web site URLs in listings on the “Welcome to Tempo” page of the Arizona Regional Multiple Listings Services (ARMLS), but I wasn’t certain it meant what it seemed to mean. Since I have been a Realtor, we have promoted our single-property websites in the remarks section of the listing, as have many other agents. It seemed odd to me, given how anal ARMLS had been about contact information in virtual tours, but I thought it was a laudable concession to real life in the third millennium.
We talk in web sites — Bloodhound Realty does, particularly. We live in webbed-wide world. This is news to no one. The appropriate way to talk about houses is in web sites. Hurray for ARMLS! It doesn’t really “get it,” but it gets at least some of it.
Not so.
Comes today this email:
Thursday, March 06, 2008Gregory Swann ABR CRS GRI,
Our new iCheck program identified the following Error. The Error and any related verbiage was removed on Thursday, March 6, 2008.
MLS#: 0000000 TEMPORARILY OFF MARKET/RES
Error: MLS Rule Error (000)
Description: Prohibited URLNo further action is required by you at this time.
Thank you for complying with the ARMLS Rules and Regulations.
I know, I know, you don’t have to tell me. I understand, I just don’t approve.
First, this is an artifact of the co-broke, the archaic practice of buyer’s representatives being paid by the listing agent. If commissions were divorced, all of the Top Secrets of the MLS system — every one of which is a violation of the buyer’s agent’s fiduciary duty to put the buyer’s interests ahead of all others (which most certainly includes the seller and the listing agent) — would be swept away like the dusty relics of the anti-capitalist era that they are.
Second, the specific purpose of forbidding web site URLs in listings is to impose an artificial chokepoint on the free market. Buyer’s agent’s seek to hold their own clients hostage in the transaction. In order to secure their own compensation, they will withhold the fact of the buyer’s existence and identity from the seller or the listing agent, at the same time that they are withholding information about the existence and identity of the seller or listing agent from their own buyers — toward whom they owe an unlimited fiduciary duty. I think this is an agency violation in se — a complete betrayal of the buyer’s true interests — and ARMLS makes itself a party to it by deliberately withholding material facts from buyers.
I don’t like lawyers and lawsuits, but I cannot imagine how the MLS system, nationwide, could be any more exposed to a massive class-action lawsuit. Buyer’s agency is a farce as long as these rules are in place. It is simply sub-agency in camouflage. The first attorney to figure that out is going to retire rich.
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March 6th, 2008 at 5:20 pm
The ARMLS committee is diligently working to ensure that the listing agents don’t abuse the remarks fields or use any other means to have a buyer bypass their buyer’s agent and go directly to the listing agent.
Why would a listing agent object? Unless, their only motive was greed to receive the full compensation and not share in a co-broke.
I fully support the ARMLS committee’s efforts in maintaining the integrity of our system for it’s properly intended use.
Below is a clipping from the updated ARMLS rules and regulations:
Therefore, all inappropriate language, as reviewed and deemed to be inappropriate by the Arizona Regional Multiple Listing Service, is immediately banned from inclusion in all listings on the MLS.
A. Banned Language. The following (beginning with item A1) is a list of examples of banned language. This list is not in any way intended to be a complete listing of inappropriate language, but only a general guide as to items that must not be included your MLS listing.
In addition to both of the Remarks fields and the Directions field, all other fields still must only have information in them for which the field is intended (e.g. the Subdivision field may only have the legal subdivision or metes and bounds information. It must not contain anything else.)
1. Public Remarks and Directions
a. Any contact information for anyone. This includes but is not limited to: names, phone numbers, and websites of any person or entity, real estate related or otherwise.
b. Any item besides contact information that may lead someone to bypass their own contracted agent to directly seek out the listing agent. This includes but is not limited to: Open house information and Auction dates. (You may disclose in the Public Remarks that it is going to be auctioned, but you must only include the date, if you are so inclined, in the Realtor Remarks).
March 6th, 2008 at 5:33 pm
> Why would a listing agent object? Unless, their only motive was greed to receive the full compensation and not share in a co-broke.
This is simply incorrect. Any thoughtful person would object for the reason I named: Because the secret fields in the MLS System (as such, nationwide) betray the buyer’s interest in having all material facts available. The MLS System as presently constituted is a vestigial expression of sub-agency, which is itself a betrayal of the buyer’s interests.
In my own particular case, you might run a simple Google search on dual agency before making accusations. I despise dual agency almost as much as I abhor the co-broke.
We have no hope of persuading the public that we are honest traders so long as we persist in holding our own clients hostage. We shouldn’t have to wait to be ordered by a judge or a legislature to reform our behavior.
All that notwithstanding, losing the ability to provide richly detailed information about listings is not any sort of benefit to the marketplace — not to buyers, not to agents, and especially not to sellers. The right name for obstructing access to information is censorship.
March 6th, 2008 at 5:54 pm
There needs to be a defined set of rules to abide by, hence the decision to rule out the above mentioned use of websites with agent branded information. This is not an attempt to with hold information from prospective buyers nor a means to censor that information.
I agree that the more available material facts there is, the better informed the buyer will be, just play by the rules.
March 7th, 2008 at 5:27 pm
Greg, I checked out some of your single property websites. They look similar to mine. Extra photos of higher quality than we can do in MLS, along with a better description of the property. Plus, the all important, “Call Greg…to make it yours today.”
As a buyer’s agent, the last thing I want my buyers doing is calling Greg. I want them calling Steve. Call the current system of buyer’s agency what you want, I think directing my buyer to your single property website is the opposite of the direction we should be moving in. In my mind, it creates a clear solicitation for the buyer to work with the listing agent, and I don’t understand how anyone could interpret it otherwise.
March 7th, 2008 at 5:44 pm
I asked these same questions last night on BloodhoundBlog:
Who is it who thinks you bring no value to buyers? You — or the buyers? If you’re delivering the goods, why would they stray?
My job is to sell the house, so of course there is a call to action. But we don’t want anything to do with dual agency. If you don’t have your buyers nailed down tight, I might end up paying someone other than you, but we won’t do dual agency unless we cannot possibly avoid it. If you have actually communicated your value proposition to your buyers, you have nothing to fear from us — nor from anyone.
In fact, you actual objection is that your buyers could strike a better deal with the listing agent by double-crossing you. The reason for that is not their having learned of the existence of the lister — a material fact you had been hiding from your own “masters” in the transaction — but the co-broke itself. If you had negotiated and contracted for your compensation with your buyers, they would have nothing to gain by betraying you.
In other words, you’re barking up the wrong tree. The rule we’re discussing is vile, but it only even exists because the co-broke is even more vile.
In the mean time, ARMLS is a lot less informative than it was just days ago. How is this in the consumer’s interests?
March 28th, 2008 at 11:44 am
[...] Greg has already pointed out, we were perplexed with the new MLS rule against promoting single property websites in the MLS. One [...]
April 18th, 2008 at 2:06 pm
Sorry Greg. I can’t agree with you either. In a perfect world we’d agree with your viewpoint, but in reality your view is very undoable. This is because as buyer’s agents like myself who rely heavily on our websites for the majority of our business, our leads and prospects are introduced to us there, and often our only relationship in the early going is through emails and web correspondence. I have a lot of Canadian buyer and out-of-state clients that I don’t meet face to face for months until they come to Phoenix, and the “relationship” you assume we should have isn’t necessarily bonded by then. When it comes to saving money, most consumers will forego using the buyer’s agent if they can go directly to the listing agent - Hey, it’s nothing personal, it’s just “business”, right? So your property websites will never get seen by my clients, guaranteed, unless they are unbranded, with no way to contact you. If you’d like me to sell one of your houses to one of my clients/prospects/leads, you’ll see that it only makes sense. Since sending only emails isn’t necessarily good enough yet for establishing “procuring cause”, I’m gonna have them wear that web-chastity belt.
August 20th, 2008 at 12:00 pm
[...] Since we are no longer permitted to point buyers to our single-property web sites in the Remarks sec…, we have been building “unbranded” versions of the sites to link to as virtual resources in ARMLS. [...]