“Mathews will join Larson Skinner from Stoel Rives LLP, where his real estate practice focused on brokerage-related matters, regulatory and licensing compliance, risk management, real estate transactions, and disputes. He serves as outside counsel to the Commercial Brokers Association and has advised multiple listing services and brokerages on issues ranging from brokerage regulation and industry forms to competition, compensation, and emerging legal risks.”

Congrats to Larson Skinner and Andrew!

The post Larson Skinner Adds Veteran Real Estate Counsel Andrew Mathews appeared first on Vendor Alley.

“The MLS exists to facilitate real estate transactions — not to weaponize our operational data against us for competitor poaching.”

Last week Victor Lund sent an email to MLSs on behalf of Compass asking them to stop feeding Compass agent data to recruiting vendors. Courted, BrokerMetrics and Brokerkit got named. There’s a 30-day deadline, plus a line about “damage claims to the MLS” that Compass will generously release if the MLS plays along. 

(Disclosure: BrokerMetrics is owned by Lone Wolf, the company Dan and I sold W+R Studios to, and Giant Steps does some work for Lone Wolf. CMAs come up below. Read accordingly.)

Everybody is going to write the recruiting story. The story I care about is demand number three. Per HousingWire, Compass also wants MLSs “to clarify Compass’s right as a participant broker to opt out of non-IDX/VOW vendor data distribution.

“Read that again. That’s an off switch. Recruiting software is just the safest place to test it, because nobody is going to march on the state capitol to save Courted. But the logic has no brakes. If a listing broker can pull its data out of a competitor’s recruiting tool, why not the competitor’s CRM? Its market reports? Its CMAs? First they came for the recruiting software…

We’ve had this fight before, and the brokers who wanted to use the data won. In 2014 The Realty Alliance pushed NAR to require MLSs to provide data feeds for broker AVMs. Rebecca Jensen, then running UtahRealEstate.com, said more than 85 percent of her brokers were against it. The NAR board passed it anyway, after a motion to send it back to committee narrowly failed. Since then, MLS content available to participants for brokerage purposes has had to be available for valuation too, and the listing broker doesn’t get a veto. Craig Cheatham said it best at the time: “Valuation is a core right and benefit, and opt out has no place in this area.”

Twelve years later, Compass wants the opt-out.

It’s also a little rich. In 2018 Inman reported that Benoit Mizner Simon, a Boston-area brokerage, spent nearly a year in acquisition talks with Compass and handed over “performance metrics of its top agents.” Talks ended in February. Within weeks, Compass hired eight of its top agents with $100,000 signing bonuses. Compass’s position back then was that all agents “have the right to choose the firm that is best for them.” In 2021 Compass sued REBNY, claiming the legacy firms were using industry rules to “thwart competitors,” including rules that kept agents from bringing clients with them when they switched firms.  That’s just the tip of the iceberg, go Google, “Compass agent recruiting lawsuits” and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

Agent mobility was sacred when Compass was the one doing the recruiting.

So why push this now? Here’s my guess, and it is a guess. Compass is rolling its platform out across @properties, Corcoran and the rest of the Anywhere brands, calling it “the largest technology deployment in residential real estate history.” Every seat that platform fills is a seat some vendor used to sell. A broker-level off switch for vendor data, held by the company that now owns Coldwell Banker, Century 21 and Sotheby’s, makes everybody else’s software a little harder to plug in. I can’t prove that’s the plan. But if I sold software into Anywhere franchise offices, I’d be reading this letter very slowly.

Here’s what I’d tell MLSs. Don’t answer this alone, and don’t answer it in 30 days. Send it to counsel, send it to CMLS, and pull out the 2014 policy. If licensing agent-level production data to recruiters is a problem (and reasonable people think it might be), fix it with a rule that applies to every participant the same way. Just stop short of a side deal with the biggest one.Because the first MLS that grants Compass an off switch will get the same letter from every broker with a lawyer.

The post First They Came for the Recruiting Software appeared first on Vendor Alley.

FBS is 100% focused on MLS success, which means solutions built around each MLS’s market, not a one-size-fits-all approach to serving the brokers and agents they work with.

That partnership shows up in the solutions MLSs can offer their brokers, from broker-directed marketing to direct access to Flexmls from the broker’s own technology tools.

FBS gives MLSs listing input and maintenance options that keep the MLS at the center, as the primary source for listing entry, while preserving the value, structure, and benefits of the MLS ecosystem. Whatever a broker’s setup, the MLS remains the rules validation engine through Flexmls, ensuring flexibility without sacrificing data quality.

Brokers get solutions for their agents, agents get to work the way that fits their operation, and the MLS still gets the complete, accurate data its ecosystem depends on. It’s how FBS builds: flexible enough to meet everyone where they are, without anyone getting boxed in.

One Partner. Unlimited Potential.

Thanks to FBS for sponsoring Vendor Alley.

The post Broker-Directed Add/Edit [Sponsor] appeared first on Vendor Alley.

You don’t have to ask me twice to spend time with Katie talking about CMAs. Thanks for having me!

The post Yours truly on the REpod with Katie Smithson appeared first on Vendor Alley.

3 Western MLSs launch ‘Orion’ data exchange

ODS founders Tina Grimes, CEO of Southern Oregon MLS, and Casie Conlon, CEO of Cascades East MLS, explained the genesis of this initiative: “Naming the initiative Orion Real Estate Data Exchange reflects our mutual vision for a borderless, data-informed real estate ecosystem. With consumer migration between Oregon, Nevada, and California, our objective is to empower our members with tools and access that help them best serve clients wherever they are.”

We’ve spent two years arguing about whether a national MLS should exist. Panels, position papers, a declaration of principles. Meanwhile MetroList, Northern Nevada Regional MLS and Oregon Data Share just built a working piece of one across three states and framed it as a service for people moving to Reno.

That’s the third one of these I’ve written up this year. Back in April the Southeast MLS Alliance added realMLS and got to 118,000 subscribers across five markets, and I tipped my hat to Joesph Cullom, because connecting the pipes without merging is the humane version of consolidation. I still think that. I’ve just started wanting to know who ends up owning the pipes.

One line in the announcement is doing more work than the rest of it combined:

“We’re starting with practical access today while building the infrastructure for a much deeper level of data sharing tomorrow.”

That’s George Pickard at NNRMLS, and the tomorrow half is the part worth reading twice.

Phase one is a shared front end. Members see listings across all three markets in Rapattoni-powered tools. Nice benefit. Not a story. Phase two pushes the data into each organization’s own primary MLS system. That’s shared infrastructure. And shared infrastructure eventually needs somebody to run it, fund it, and decide who else gets in.

Nobody’s saying who that is. No governance structure, no subscriber counts, no word on who’s funding the build. What we do get is the Rapattoni mention, and Rapattoni is the quietly interesting part. Niki Rapattoni is still running the company she and Andy started in 1970. While Cotality and most of the rest of the legacy MLS stack were getting tucked into private equity portfolios, MLS system vendors like Rapattoni and FBS have managed to stay independent. So the connective tissue for three states is now sitting on top of the one of the MLS vendors nobody managed to roll up.

And MetroList keeps shipping. I said the same thing about them when Nora launched, so at this point it isn’t a compliment, it’s a pattern. Now they’re doing it again with two neighbors and a migration stat: 129,000 people moved between California, Nevada and Oregon in 2024. That’s a refreshingly boring reason to build something. Consumers moved, so the data should follow them.

So here’s the question nobody asked at launch. In year three, who owns Orion? Phase two is when that answer gets expensive to change.

The post They called it a migration service appeared first on Vendor Alley.

September 30.

Supporting Wounded Warrior Project.

#331#authors#realestate#WoundedWarriorProject

The post DON’T BUY MY BOOK. Buy his. appeared first on Vendor Alley.

September 30.

Supporting Wounded Warrior Project.

#331 #authors #realestate #WoundedWarriorProject

The post DON’T BUY MY BOOK. Buy his. appeared first on Vendor Alley.

One sharpens how you price.
One sharpens how you plan.
One sharpens how you use AI

September 30.

Supporting Wounded Warrior Project.

#331#authors#realestate#WoundedWarriorProject

The post Three problems real estate cannot ignore appeared first on Vendor Alley.

“It appears that filing was timed to stave off Ocean II PLO LLC, secured creditor, that intended to conduct a public foreclosure sale in California on the same date as of the filing. The noticed collateral included substantially all of HouseCanary’s assets and property, including accounts, receivables, deposit and securities accounts, equipment, inventory, investment property, general intangibles, certain intellectual-property-related payment rights, and proceeds. The foreclosure notice excluded specified assets, most notably HouseCanary’s claims and proceeds from long-running Texas litigation involving Amrock Inc., and Quicken Loans Inc.”

Yikes!

The post House Canary files Chapter 11 appeared first on Vendor Alley.

Reach out if you want to connect!

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