Industry News

Friday January 27, 2023

 Industry News:

NAR vs DOJ Lawsuit -  A judge has ruled in favor of NAR in the NAR suit against the DOJ for backing out of their previous agreement, which include dropping continuing investigation into IDX/VOW policies.   It is expected that the DOJ will appeal.

Nestfully launch:  Three MLS organizations have announced plans to launch a consumer portal in the first quarter of 2023.  They are hoping to have other MLS organizations join in this effort, but we do not yet have details on costs to participate,  how leads are generated to agents nor what the marketing plan is to drive consumer traffic to this new site.   The site will be powered by Constellation1, which provides IDX sites for Brokers and Agents.

Realtor.com acquistion?  There have been rumors that the Co-Star group is making a bid to acquire Move, the operator of Realtor.com.   This is just a rumor at this point, but one we will be following closely as this could impact the business model of Realtor.com.

New login for MLS Single Sign On!

On Tuesday, January 24, the SSO Dashboard login page launched a fresh, new look.

This new login page also has new security features and allows users to save their login credentials!   If a users risk score begins to rise, they will be challenged to type in credentials and lose the "saved" login privilege.

Broker Bay Clarifications:

There has been some misinformation floating among agents in the field, so to clarify:

Inspectors:   We have provided a file of Inspectors & Photographers to Broker Bay for their programmers to review - we have a couple of possibilities for how they can integrate this data and we expect to have a plan from them in the next few days - but no ETA on an actual, workable solution yet.  UPDATE:  A  plan is in place for Broker Bay to ingest this data from us and we are cleaning up the data files received from each Association to include all the data points required.  We hope to have this completed next week.

Appraisers - Appraisers are set up in NTREIS as MLS Participants, so have the same access to Broker Bay as any Broker or Agent.   We have clarified this with the call center as they were including this group in the same cateogry as the Inspector group.

Showing in Pending:  As there are occassions when the buyer agent may need access to the property for the buyer or contractors, etc,  Broker Bay has a solution in development to add this option and it is expected to be released in an upcoming update (Feb 2023 ETA).

Adoption rate:  While over half of firms have launched,  to date we have about 26% of agents that have claimed and set up their account profile.  For Granbury, Arlington and Lewisville agents, that number is over 35%!

Call Center:  The appointment call center takes calls from 7 am to 9 pm CST.   However,  agents do need to "opt in" to allow the call center to contact their sellers (or other showing configurations) outside of "business day" hours.   Once an agent opts in, they can then "opt out" of that option for individual listings that should NOT be contacted after 5.

They are working towards a more streamlined solution for this, but the opt in is currently required.   There is no additional cost for this "concierge service" - it is included in our NTREIS contract, but the individual opt in is required to activate.

Additionally, we have had reports of agents not getting an answer at the call center, going to voicemail or put on hold.  Broker Bay is investigating those complaints; however, they track call response times which currently is averaging  under  20 second.  They do not have a voicemail system on the Appointment Desk, so this may be from users using an old number - we originally had published a general support number, but have since published the Appointment center number (1-800-257-1242).