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Portland MLS Changes Rules on Address Display
One of the last holdouts among major multiple listing services (MLS), the REALTOR® board that encompasses Portland (and several other Oregon communities and SW Washington) has changed its policy regarding the display of property addresses on selected Internet sites.
As of November 1, 2008, the RMLS (Regional Multiple Listing Service) will no longer prohibit the display of property address on broker websites that use the IDX (internet data exchange) policy. The IDX policy was designed by the National Association of Realtors (NAR) in 2000 and authorizes:
MLS participants to display on their websites the listings of other participants, subject to certain requirements and limitations.
The NAR provides considerable leeway for individual boards to set their own policies on what information is shown, but the vast majority of metropolitan boards across the nation have been showing address information for some time.
This means that many of the local Realtor sites may soon begin to show the property address. I say ‘may’ because it isn’t mandatory, but I expect most IDX participants to adopt the practice. Agents may exclude individual listings (with owner’s authorization), and brokers can exclude all their listings on a blanket basis, but this should be rare.
In my opinion, the exclusion of the address field created an unnecessary barrier to consumer information—forcing casual home shoppers into creating assumed business relationships with agents, when all they wanted to know was the location of the property so they could do a drive-by, or look up the neighborhood on Google’s Street View.
The rule change will benefit pure search sites like Estately.com and Roost.com, who already receive IDX information from RMLS. Others that do show address information, such as Trulia.com and Zillow.com, are not part of the IDX program, relying instead on data feeds from aggregators or through direct inclusion by brokers.
How long it will take for addresses to show up is dependent on the individual website vendors that provide IDX services to their broker customers, but I expect it to be very shortly after the November 1 rules change.
Photo by darwinbell, used under Creative Commons license.
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8 Responses to “Portland MLS Changes Rules on Address Display”
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It’s about time. I’ve been finding it pretty amusing being able to go to Estately or Roost and zoom in far enough to know where the house is, but still not be able to see the address. With the addition of Street View, it’s even more entertaining.
Nick,
Yes, the address field is currently provided in the IDX feed, but only for mapping purposes, not for actual display.
[...] Portland MLS Changes Rules on Address Display. Share this post: [...]
This is great news! As a Realtor within this RMLS I am most happy to hear we will be able to provide the addresses without forcing people to register to get this information. Thanks for reporting Joel.
Dale’s note reminds me that this will affect SW Washington listings in RMLS as well.
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[...] the USA is slowly bringing it’s data walls down. According to the guys over at Estately and re:PDX , the rules regarding what you can do with the property data and what is available to third [...]
Good news indeed… especially when you consider the use of ’single site’ property pages on the net using the address as the URL. In this age of web 2.0 transparency, why would you think you could control public data?