With a friend/partner you trust, but verify. Since Realtor.com is not seen around here as a friend, many of you adopted a new slogan: Don’t trust and don’t verify. I make it a rule to never believe anything that doesn’t seem to make sense.
The NAR/R.com response…
NAR, REALTOR.com Set Record Straight on Erroneous FSBO Claims
A press release issued on Wed., Nov. 12, by ForSaleByOwner.com contained inaccuracies and misleading statements about its ability to place unlisted for-sale-by-owner information on REALTOR.com, the official Web site of the National Association of REALTORS® operated by Move Inc. NAR and REALTOR.com are setting the record straight with the following clarifications:
1) The settlement agreement between NAR and the U.S. Department of Justice made no provision to allow unlisted properties, such as “for-sale-by-owner,” to be posted on REALTOR.com.
2) ForSaleByOwner.com does not in any way enable home sellers to advertise their home on REALTOR.com without broker representation; every property on REALTOR.com must be listed by a licensed real estate broker.
3) REALTOR.com has not authorized ForSaleByOwner.com to resell REALTOR.com’s Showcase Listings Enhancement package.
4) There is no relationship between ForSaleByOwner.com and REALTOR.com.
5) There are no unrepresented homes on REALTOR.com. Every property on REALTOR.com must be listed by a licensed real estate broker, and unrepresented properties would not qualify to be submitted to a REALTOR®-owned and operated MLS.
REALTOR.com® has asked ForSaleByOwner.com to issue a retraction. ForSaleByOwner.com did not discuss in advance the statements in its press release with REALTOR.com® nor did it request or receive permission to use the REALTOR.com® name in its press release. For more information contact Lucien Salvant 202/383-1176.
Greg Swann says:
> There are no unrepresented homes on REALTOR.com.
There are no unrepresented homes anywhere. It’s the age of the $99 MLS listing. I think this fracas is a very good example of how decent people can get themselves all stirred up over nothing while managing to overlook everything that matters. The important NAR news is here.
November 14, 2008 — 2:00 pm
Eric Blackwell says:
Hey Dave-
I agree about the don’t trust part. R.com has EARNED that. No apologies there.
And I agree with Greg that the result was a tempest in a teapot.
But I think there is one thing to learn from this as well.
I did apologize and retract for not getting the information correct. ForSaleByOwner.com lied (in my estimation). Plain and simple.
HOWEVER
When R.com is contacted and after 3 “higher ups” are contacted and they start with stupidity like “We are not going to confirm or deny this…We will issue a statement within 48 hours.” At that point we have TRIED to verify. It is THEY who fouled up.
How long does it take for them to utter the 4 words that everyone NEEDED to hear:
“It is a hoax.”
That’s all they had to say. No one official said it. The earliest reports that I saw was a comment by a reader on AG who I did not know who claimed to have been called by Errol.
There was a legitimate press release from a legitimate company touting each of the things that is now denied.
There was NOONE calling it a hoax.
I have apologized for unknowingly spreading what turned out to be a cruel hoax. I stand by that.
But Mr. Samuelson (and by extension, the PR folks at R.com), your fingers are not painted on. You can quickly comment on this stuff, too.
Sherry Chris does.
Other real estate industry executives do.
Louis Cammarrosano does.
It should not take a team of lawyers to decide the right way to say “this was/is a hoax.”
4 words.
November 14, 2008 — 2:22 pm
Barry Cunningham says:
yawn!
Seriously, do you really think that anybody outside of the real estate blogosp[here even cares about the obvious semantic ballet being played out here.
Seriously, I have watched and read agents on AR, AG and elsewhere whining and complaining and pontificating about this whole issue when I wonder why they don’t just step back and say to themselves..”hey, the consumer can read this stuff and we look like whining drama queens”!
Man, with the economy in the state that it is (or in the state that some think it is), with the election of a new president, with automakes and banks losing their collective tails…who really gives a rat’s patootie to what does or doesn’t get listed on Realtor.com…geez…
It’s amazing how seriously out of touch so many real estate agents are.
How about figuring out how to do short sales, or marketing for buyers, or how to make owner financing work or moving REO properties? It is absolutely pathetic that THIS issue gets people’s ire up whil unsold inventory and the overall lack of ability to respond to the needs of the general public at large seems to pale in comparison.
Seriously..anyone who thinks the consumer cares even one infinitesimal iota about this is out of their minds!
November 14, 2008 — 2:24 pm
Dave Phillips says:
Frankly, I’m not sure what all the concern was about to begin with. What’s wrong with having ALL homes for sale in the same database? Sounds efficient to me. There has always been a certain percentage of FSBO properties and there always will be. The number of FSBO’s has not risen significantly because of the Internet. Realtors should not be scared of FSBO’s. In fact, the “listed FSBOs” that we are talking about here are better than unlisted FSBOs. At least we know about them and there is an offer of compensation.
November 14, 2008 — 2:29 pm
Dave Phillips says:
Eric,
Sorry if it sounded like I was calling you out on this. It started other places and I thought your post gave readers the option to question the issue. Many failed to do so and just assumed something that made no sense to be true. I’m okay with not trusting R.com, but everyone gets the benefit of the doubt. Granted, a quick response would have kept the Internet explosion from happening, but I called it a hoax after reading the first paragraph. It just did not make any sense.
November 14, 2008 — 2:39 pm
Dave Phillips says:
Barry,
Like always, you are spot on. You may be as warm as fuzzy as barbwire, but you are also as pointed.
November 14, 2008 — 2:42 pm
Barry Cunningham says:
Thank you Mr. Phillips…you as well..a centalized place for all inventory only makes sense…it’s serioously a DUH!
November 14, 2008 — 3:13 pm
Matt Carter says:
Greg’s right it’s the age of $99 MLS listing. Lots of other folks are doing what ForSaleByOwner.com is doing, although maybe more often at the individual broker level than on a “network” scale.
What seems to have caused this “tempest in a teapot” was the suggestion by ForSaleByOwner.com that they had gained “direct access” to Realtor.com through the NAR-DOJ settlement.
That was puzzling, so we decided to wait until we could get further details from ForSaleByOwner.com before running a story. A few bloggers — including some who did not take ForSaleByOwner’s claim at face value — ran with the press release.
Eric, Realtor.com may have been slow to get back to you because they were also perplexed by ForSaleByOwner.com’s claims. When I talked to Greg Healy at ForSaleByOwner.com on Thursday morning, he explained that they were contracting with brokers to enter listings in an MLS outside the seller’s market.
Until I relayed that information to Move spokeswoman Julie Reynolds in an effort to obtain a comment from them, I believe they were in the dark on that point (I know I certainly was). Reynolds then provided me with a statement that contained the points later released by NAR.
If you read the ForSaleByOwner.com press release carefully, it seems that Barry is correct and they were engaged in a “semantic ballet” rather than an outright lie.
The press release raised more questions than it answered, and as it turned out the first stop in getting those questions answered was with the people who put the press release out, not those mentioned in it.
November 14, 2008 — 6:07 pm
Dave Barnes says:
As a consumer and not involved in the real estate business at all, I say: I hope the NAR and Realtor.com die a quick and PAINFUL death.
November 14, 2008 — 9:00 pm
Cheryl Johnson says:
Like Dave, I was seeing an upside to having a database of FSBOs easily accessible on R.com. I’m kinda sorry the rumour wasn’t true. 🙂
November 15, 2008 — 4:28 am
Greg Swann says:
> I was seeing an upside to having a database of FSBOs easily accessible on R.com.
In LA, don’t you have this from Redfin.com?
November 15, 2008 — 9:30 am
Thesa Chambers, Broker Licensed in Oregon says:
Ok… am I the only one that sees it like this…. my buyer is cruising around the net stumbles on a fsbo.com listing on r.com and peaks an interest – who they gonna call????? ME – I could care less what r.com does – throw every home on the market world wide on there – give the buyer a chance to see the same thing in a different format – it may peak an interest that the MLS did not… build a good relationship with your clients – and they will come back to you – NO MATTER who or where they find the info.
Quit whining – get to work selling these homes.
November 15, 2008 — 3:44 pm
Cheryl Johnson says:
@Greg, Re Redfin: I think the answer comes down to “sometimes”.
Back in April or May there was a lot of talk about Redfin including FSBOs and REOs in their database. But it appears, the FSBOs don’t appear, unless the owner has posted in Oodle, or somewhere similar.
This from the Redfin forum: http://forums.redfin.com/rf/board/message?board.id=SiteQuestions&message.id=741
Maybe Glenn will stop by and comment further.
I think NAR could do worse than follow Redfin’s lead in mashing up data from many different sources.
November 16, 2008 — 5:57 am
Matt Goyer - Redfin says:
Redfin gets its FSBOs from ForSaleByOwner.com and Oodle. Oodle itself is an aggregator of classified sites and represents about 50 different sources.
November 16, 2008 — 9:45 pm