By Coach A:

My goal was to enjoy my 3 day weekend with my family and get away from the wild and wacky world that is San Francisco real estate. As many of you Schtuffers know, Garrett puts a ton of time and effort into this blog and is always trying to provide information to end users in an effort to empower buyers and sellers. At Home San Francisco we firmly believe in providing our clients with all the info we have access to.

Many will recall the controversy with Seductively Sold- namely with 1 SF Realtor filing a complaint and forcing Garrett to password protect certain sold data. Garrett complied and changed how the information is displayed. We both think our Association is barking up the wrong tree by limiting the data they allow the public to access. Our feeling has always been - give people the info - ALL the info and in turn they will be grateful and ultimately become a client.

I had laid the argument with our fellow Association member to rest - even though I think his attack of Garrett was uncalled for and extremely unprofessional. Then I received an email which literally made my skin crawl. It’s election time for the San Francisco Association of Realtors and guess who is running to be a Director of our Association - none other than our favorite data watchdog! Running for the position is fine with me - sending our entire Association an email with your “platform” (a first in my 7 years of membership) is flat out annoying and inappropriate in my opinion. The other individuals running for Director didn’t see the need to SPAM our association with their thoughts and goals - but leave it to DataPolice to sour my weekend.

Below is the e-mail I received. Essentially DataPolice wants to further monopolize the MLS data and prevent 3rd party vendors from using it to attract leads - which in turn these 3rd party vendors sell back to local Realtors. I think we call that capitalism and it’s actually looked at favorably here in America. Instead of finding new ways to attract and service buyers and sellers, DataPolice wants to protect data and force the public to gain info from only one source. And Realtors wonder why our perception is similar to used car salesmen!? Enjoy the read and if you are a Realtor, Vote For Pedro or write in Greg Angilly on your Director ballot!

Dear Gregory,

I see the largest need for our members is to create a public face MLS that will remove the benefit of the middle-men companies that take our content and data and then sell us placement and leads. If elected that will be my focus and contribution back to you.

A little over 100 years ago real estate professionals came together and created a business model that was beneficial to the client and to the professionals. It was scalable and efficient. It is our associations. Now we need to come together again to create a new business model.

The public wants free access to information. We own the format the data is in and we own the data. Listing aggregators and tax-record compilers are already working on getting the data that we hold and are giving it to the public. But after getting our data and using our content to create attraction and users, they turn around and charge us for access the users. I propose to work on creating a portal that will be the best and most useful site for accessing our data.

What will this accomplish? Instead of Mr & Ms Public getting to the point where they have digested enough data, it’s time to raise thier hand, because now they need a professional they won’t be on a third party site that wants to sell us the lead.

Other associations are taking action. We can too.

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