I hope that all the MLS bigwigs who read this keep this in mind. There are many of us who want to make sure the local mls is independent of NAR in perpetuity, Please be careful in the decision making process that you all face. You cant afford to get this wrong. Proceed with caution and do your due diligence.

Regarding being a property-centric system, what RPR is doing now is no different than what MLS systems and operators have been doing for years, tying all the data together in one place. Most MLS systems today have listings, public records, maps, statistics, etc., all tied together around the parcel number or property address. There are a couple of key points I’d make about this “all in one place” approach, though:

(1) Links Not Silos. The idea that you can actually get “all” the information about a property in one place in this day of the Interwebs is false, particularly with the closed approach RPR is taking. Though RPR is claiming to be promoting a universal property ID, I’m aware of no plans to making that ID discoverable by anyone except maybe a Realtor and there will be no way to link to it from what I understand. I certainly understand the need and desire for RPR to create a Realtor-only resource, but the one piece of RPR that should be widely distributed and accessible is the universal property ID. Again, I wrote about this issue here and here and here some time ago as well. To sum all that up, think “small pieces loosely joined.” RPR is just fooling its members and the public by making claims of having “all” the data, because it won’t and can’t.

(2) Data Quality. Data silos do make sense in one aspect, if they create and protect an authoritative record. Again, RPR’s currently stated approach is the same one MLSs are already doing, so the value add isn’t there. Value could be created, however, if an authoritative record were being created that was more up to date than the tax records and more permanent than the listing records. The idea here is to divorce the marketing information from the “factual” information about the property, and make the factual information sacrosanct or controlled as to quality. By not addressing that issue, RPR isn’t adding to what MLSs are already doing. To the contrary, MLSs are already taking the true property-centric approach and so are or will be doing what RPR is not.

Thinking about your question above on overlapping markets, the RPR system is designed to solve the huge problem of data access for it’s members. As you mention in the RPR system if you are a member of a cooperating MLS, you are going to be able to see the data from all the other cooperating MLS’s.

Also to your point about the authoritative record, I do not believe we would be doing the REALTOR a service by saying well we mashed all the data together…and it’s not completely transparent how we mashed it together. Instead we’re laser focused on providing the aggregate information. We’re going to inform the REALTOR on how anybody else is going to see the record…For example how’s the Mortgage Broker or Lender going to see it, how are the other agents going to see it, etc. The REALTOR needs to see all that information side by side…in one complete property-centric record.

More to the point, I’m also curious about the issue of reconciling data sources. If the business model of the RPR is to profit (in part) by adding the “wisdom of the Realtor crowds” it seems a bit odd that there won’t be a way to substitute that wisdom in place of a piece of data that is less accurate.

RPR expects to save mls entities around the country a collective $30 million plus on tax info.

Once the MLS sells its soul to RPR for free tax records, its over.

What a great move