A new look for MLS?

Three industry leaders spoke at this morning’s Inman Conference. David Charron, President & CEO of MRIs; Bud Fogel, CEO, Midwest Real Estate Data LLC; and Scott Kurcirek, Co-Founder, ZipRealty & CalMLS. They debated the future of the MLS and whether it is collaboration, consolidation or direct to consumers. The points covered include:

• A National MLS, as a consumer facing database, not a proprietary Broker MLS, is not a bad idea
• Brokers need to be more directly involved with their data
• While competition between MLS’ is good it pits REALTOR dollars against other REALTOR dollars
• There is a huge opportunity for local MLS’ to provide better market analytics than the national players can provide
• Better data on a communities micro markets is beneficial to all
• The aggregation of data and analytics is just as important as facilitating offers of compensation
• Efforts at leveling the playing field are shortsighted
• Integrating social networking directly with listings is 12 to 15 months away
• Aggregation, syndication, and distribution will be core services of MLS in 2009

There was a general feeling that this point in time is an opportunity for MLS’ to reinvent an old system and bring it more in line with today’s business practices and expectations.

What do you think? Is it time to revamp the MLS?

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Tags: future, MLS

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 8th, 2009 at 3:55 pm and is filed under Industry News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.