NAR is now concerned about “an even playing field for all real estate content online?”
I find this incredibly interesting, and more than a little obtuse on their part. After basically turning the industry over to companies like Zillow who monopolize the search results and demand a ransom in the form of paid advertising for REALTORS to actually buy back their own listings AND who now want to get in the business of actually facilitating real estate offers…now NAR – National Association of Realtors is concerned about maintaining “an even playing field for all real estate content online?” The reason Zillow is able to monopolize search results is because REALTOR associations and IDX providers sell the data to Zillow for huge amounts of money. A normal, every day REALTOR..even a pretty technologically savvy REALTOR…will have a hard time going up against Zillow in standard search results. Of course SEO challenges are the reason RETS PRO built our WordPress real estate plugin and the reason we continue to constantly make changes and improvements, but if the REALTOR Associations had been concerned about “even playing fields,” they wouldn’t have afforded companies like Zillow the opportunity and ability to play by an entirely different set of rules than everybody else.