What’s Next for VOW and IDX?

 

I’ve had some awesome and brutal conversations with brokers and their technologists over the years about VOW and IDX. “When are the handcuffs coming off?” a broker will ask, “Why is our MLS sending listings to sites that don’t have to comply with the same rules we do?” Leave aside for the moment that the decision where the listings go is up to the broker, not the MLS, and keep listening. The technologist will ask, “Why is there a limit to the number of listings displayed per inquiry?” and “Is there a good reason we have to send an email to validate a social login before giving the user access to the VOW? The social media company already validated this email.” Helping MLSs with compliance, I hear these types of questions, again and again.

My answers don’t sound great to those folks. “This was a non-technical person’s idea of ‘anti-scraping’ near the end of the last century, and that other thing was part of a consent decree and we can’t question it.” I mumble words about “compromise” and “there’s a way to get this changed,” and “good people on these committees” and they don’t want to hear it. When can we take the handcuffs off the brokers and the people helping them?

Thanks for making this post public Alex!

My company puts on an event every year where we dive into MLS-related questions in depth with MLS executives and their staff. It’s called the “Clareity MLS Executive Workshop” and the next one is coming up February 26-28, 2020 (save the date). At the one in 2018, I initiated a panel discussion of these questions, including a broker and some IDX vendors, hoping people at the event who were on the MLS policy committee might try to drive forward a solution, maybe even before the NAR-DOJ VOW consent decree that was tying everyone’s hands expired, so that brokers could come flying out the gate in 2020. I’ve heard some of the ideas are being discussed, but my hopes for a fast resolution were overly optimistic.

There were two main approaches suggested by panelists at the Clareity MLS Executive Workshop:

1. Total rewrite; go back to principles
2. Incremental change

There were areas where all the panelists agreed:

• Re-write IDX and VOW as one policy
• Don’t do much to force extensive change on existing sites
• Don’t take capabilities away with new rules: add to them.
• Try to stay technology agnostic

The Re-write Approach

Panelist Andy Woolley was the biggest proponent of the re-write approach, suggesting we consider the FTC’s “Truth in Advertising” approach:

“When consumers see or hear an advertisement, whether it’s on the Internet, radio or television, or anywhere else, federal law says that ad must be truthful, not misleading, and, when appropriate, backed by scientific evidence. The Federal Trade Commission enforces these truth-in-advertising laws, and it applies the same standards no matter where an ad appears – in newspapers and magazines, online, in the mail, or on billboards or buses.” (FTC Website)

What principles would be described in this approach? I went back and looked at Clareity’s 2011 Syndication Bill of Rights as a starting point for inspiration. Yes, I admit it needs updates – it was created at a different time for a very different purpose, as was the “Fair Display Guidelines” it inspired.

The Syndication Bill of Rights

1. The publisher will display the listing firm contact information, including phone number, in a prominent location on the listing detail page at no cost.
2. The publisher will provide a prominent link to the broker, agent, and/or MLS website, home page or property detail page if provided, and will not use “nofollow” tags that negatively affect the SEO benefit of such links.
3. If the publisher displays non-listing agent/firm information, then: (a) the full contact information for the listing agent/firm must be displayed at no charge, and these parties must be clearly identified as the listing agent/firm; (b) the listing/agent firm information must be displayed more prominently than the third-party agent/firm information; and (c) the site must not send leads to third party agents or firms if the consumer has not selected them as a contact recipient, and non-listing agents and firms will not be the default(pre-selected)choice for consumer contact.
4. The publisher has a process for ensuring data accuracy with the data provider(s); ensuring data is updated or removed as appropriate, at least every three days.
5. The publisher displays the date the listing data was last confirmed and updated, and the name of the data provider.
6. The publisher respects the intellectual property of brokers and MLSs. The terms and conditions do not require brokers and MLSs to give up rights (beyond display rights) or to grant rights in perpetuity. The terms and conditions allow the listings to be used only for the explicit purpose for which they were provided. An accuracy disclaimer and copyright notice is displayed, attributing the copyright holder of the information. The publisher must obtain explicit consent from the data provider for any other uses or derivative works.
7. The publisher does not re-syndicate, sub-license, power, or display listings on other websites without informing the data provider and obtaining their consent.
8. The publisher will provide aggregate statistics regarding traffic, at no cost, to the data provider.
9. The publisher provides reasonable mechanisms for preventing screen scraping and misuse of the listing data, understanding that some listing information must be exposed to search engines.
10. The publisher does not re-syndicate to or “power” sites that fail to uphold the previously described rights

IDX could probably be a LOT simpler, and some of the items above belong in a data license agreement rather than in MLS policy.  Words like “prominent” seem to cause conflict due to differences in interpretation. Remember this though: the simpler and more general the policy is, the more it will be “gamed” and harder it will be to ensure compliance with the spirit of the rules. But the three general principles I pull out from the items above are these:

• Timely and Accurate Information
• Listing Broker Benefit / Attribution (for use by site users and search engines alike)
• Security and Respect for Intellectual Property

Bill Fowler thinks the over-thinking begins with the feeds and says, “A broker feed should be every field in the database. Brokers can use it to their own ends if the display to consumer has specific limitations. Display is the line in the sand. But exactly what are we afraid the consumer will do with access to more information?”

Fellow industry advisor Jack Miller says, “We need to consider the reason that brokers develop websites. If it is for lead generation, then the whole broker attribution, contact information, and leads pieces become important. Without allowing brokers and agents to capture leads from IDX listings effectively, the SEO/SEM incentives for brokers and agents collapses and the traffic ends up going to the portals, with little reason for brokers and agents to do anything different.”

I saw a proposal from an MLS earlier this year that took a principle-based approach to advertising rather than getting caught up in the technology, but I don’t believe it’s being considered by the NAR committee – though they may surprise me. If the committee does take this approach, I hope it considers what other principles are important to brokers, but not get bogged down in the specific implementation details when expanding from principles to policy.  Whatever approach is used, perhaps many of the details could be separated into a separate implementation guide or even into a developer’s guide.

The Incremental Approach

During the Clareity workshop, I collaborated with panelists to go through IDX and VOW rules and consider what would happen if we took a more incremental approach, combining VOW into IDX, making minor wording changes to some rules, organizing the sections better, eliminating options as much as possible (respecting ease of implementation of no options, while respecting state laws that might mandate options), modernizing and, in a few cases, eliminating rules. Colors were added to indicate which issue related to which rule. This is an illustration of what came out of that effort:

This is a big effort but, if the incremental approach was selected, I’d suggest it may be worth doing again to capture the committee members’ and subject matter expert opinions rather than just mine and my panelists’ ideas. I think differently about some of these rules these days than I did when we went through this exercise. For example, rather than updating the VOW registration rules, I’d probably suggest doing away with many of them. The way IDX has changed over the years, what’s available with no login is very close to what’s available with the login anyway, so why force a login? If we focus on letting brokers do more I would hope we could avoid some of the legal concerns about making changes to VOW rules.

CMLS has begun that effort by combining IDX and VOW into a single set of rules and, if the NAR committee doesn’t want to take the re-write approach, the CMLS recommendation may be a good foundation for the committee to build on: re-organizing, eliminating options as much as possible, as well as modernizing and eliminating rules. NAR’s Rene Galicia says, “NAR supports MLS policies that embrace the changing technological landscape in furtherance of an ongoing pro-competitive and pro-consumer marketplace. The NAR MLS Committee is now reviewing a recommendation submitted by CMLS that would combine the IDX and VOW policies. We should have an update on the status of that recommendation by the November meeting.”

The Past and the Future

There’s a line by poet e. e. cummings that is good to remember at a time like this: “honor the past and welcome the future”.  I have a ton of respect for the people who created IDX and what they accomplished: online was a new world, and they helped our brokerage community take the first steps into that world while substantially avoiding the potential legal fights that brokers could have had over this new use of their listings.  And NAR did the best it could with the DOJ. Perhaps if there had been more time to engage stakeholders and other smart folks the VOW rules may have been better. But that’s looking backward when we need for look ahead.

I have some advice for the folks moving this effort forward: Involve MANY stakeholders (brokers, agents, vendors, industry experts, MLS executives and compliance staff, and attorneys), release policy drafts for further input all through the process – not just a few weeks before NAR meetings – and iterate a LOT.  It’s time to look forward with lessons learned, I’m excited to see what comes from it. Let’s create the future we want to see.