[guest2143]

Nothing came of it? The whole Virtual Office Website (VOW) thing got created.. before meetings NAR and RESO intone legalese about encouraging competition. There's a lot of fear that the FTC will step back in and do something. With the level of MLS balkanization, innovation has a bunch of high hurdles.

[GabeRicard]

VOW, and IDX also. The whole reason that sites like Zillow, Redfin, etc. exist is because of the (successful) lawsuit against NAR causing them to open up their data to third party companies.

I worked for a real estate company building an online real estate service since before the creation of VOW/IDX. Prior to that, the way we got access was through my boss's own real estate brokerage account with the state's main MLS. We expanded to support more MLS's in the area and each one was a huge pain in the ass. We had to have customers who were members of that MLS BEFORE they would give us access to their data. They would limit the data we had access to as much as they possibly could, and had absurd rules about what could/could not be displayed publicly, as well as privately when members of our customers' sites were logged in. It became much easier to get access to the data after the VOW/IDX implementations rolled out at each MLS.

[paulie_a]

Oh god the horrors that are idx. I just had flashbacks of dealing with the various schemas from different MLSs

[clairity]

i mean, relative to what they could have done (sued for damages and broken up the monopoly), structurally nothing changed.

but if you promote free and fair markets, you'd discourage/dismantle this kind of protectionism.

[mobilefriendly]

The Bush Justice Department did sue! https://www.justice.gov/archive/atr/public/press_releases/20...