Any Color You Want, As Long As It's Black. The NAR, Realtor.com and Real Estate Search

Henry Ford told car buyers, "You can have any color you want, as long as it's black."  NAR, Move.com and Realtor.com tell us the same thing, "You can have any type of Real Estate Search you want ,as long as it's MLS."

Once upon a time: Realtor.com (The Mother of All Real Estate Websites) negotiated with Google (the Mother of All Internet Search) to supply NAR's Real Estate Search.  When Google saw NAR's 1,000 page "hide-our-data" contract with Realtor.com, and Realtor.com saw Google's stated vision to: "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful": Never the twain shall meet.

Real Estate 1.0, the NAR, Realtor.com, and MLS-Friendly Search are all about Big Real Estate, Big Brokers, hard sell, withhold data until you get the information.  House first, ads second and home buyer third.  Real Estate 2.0, Real Estate Search 2.0 and Real Estate Search Marketing 2.0, Google and Zillow are all about open data, open communication, contextual ads, and free content.  Just where and when are these twains meeting?

We need to face the fact that Real Estate 1.0's "Location, Location, Location" has transformed into Real Estate 2.0's "Traffic, Traffic, Traffic".  Either the NAR and Realtor.com change to Real Estate Search 2.0 or Google and Zillow will eat their virtual lunch before you can say "FTC", "DOJ" or "SEO" (Federal Trade Commission, Department of Justice, Search Engine Optimization).

NAR and many Realtors are paranoid (Zillonoid) Zillow will use their bigger and better Real Estate Search Engine to start a National Real Estate Brokerage, which will dominate Real Estate.  Why isn't Zillow paranoid (NAR-anoid) that the NAR and the Realtor.com-mies will dominate Real Estate Search with a better Search Engine, instead of the NAR's trying to dominate Real Estate by hidding our listing data?

NAR, Move.com and Realtor.com give home searchers MLS-Friendly Search. What home searchers want is home searcher User-Friendly Search.  Should we Realtors tolerate Realtor.com taking pages from the Federal Trade Commission's (FTC) and Department of Justice's (DOJ) Law Books, or should we embrace Real Estate 2.0 Search, taking pages from the Google Playbook, like Zillow.com?

If you could search on Google for Real Estate, wouldn't you?  You search for every thing else on Google.  Why not Real Estate?

Happy Searching.

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