Is Your Website DOJ Compliant?
On May 27th this year, the US Department of Justice and the National Association of REALTORS® finally reached a settlement. In the settlement, it was agreed that our MLS data could be released to the public by any member company under some very specific terms and conditions. Practically speaking, what it means is that nearly every single real estate website that offers an MLS or IDX link to real estate shoppers is no longer in material compliance with that settlement agreement, and continuing to offer listings to the public on a non-compliant website could result in serious sanctions and possibly the loss of access to the MLS.
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So what does it take to be in compliance? A website owner must install a registration gateway, and require any MLS/IDX user to register with a unique username and password. The user must also affirmatively consent to a very specific “Terms of Use” and “Privacy Policy” which must be included on the VOW website. Finally, the website owner is required to maintain all registration information, all user names, all passwords, and all contact information for each registered user for a period of not less than 180 days, and to provide for a complete audit trail to the Department of Justice upon request.
The DOJ settlement requires that any website using MLS/IDX data begin making steps toward compliance within 90 days of the settlement (May 27, 2008) or in other words, in less than three months. Every website must be in full compliance no later than Thanksgiving Day 2008 or face the risk of serious sanctions, like losing the ability to use the data. Needless to say, there will be a lot of agents caught by this one. From our initial surveys, most agents are expecting their local MLS’s to solve the problems for them, and they don’t realize that it is the agent’s responsibility to get their site into compliance.
My company, FavoriteAgent.com, has been licensing real estate technology for over 5 years to over 14,000 agents world-wide, and recently we decided to make our DOJ compliant gateway available to any agent free of charge. No strings attached. Why would we do that? Easy. Our company was founded on the principle of agents helping other agents. And since we have already developed this technology and have been using it for over 5 years, and over 5 million registered users, we thought we would share it with our fellow agents.
We also believe that once you get to know us, you’ll like our company and our technology, so that when you need one of our other technologies, you’ll consider us. Think of it like free Adobe Reader. One day you may need to create pdf documents, so you’ll probably buy Adobe Acrobat. Anyway, if you’d like to use our free DOJ/NAR compliance gateway, free and with no strings attached, click here and get yours in less than 5 minutes. No kidding. It will work with any website and it will get you 100% compliant with lots of time to spare. Oh, and one more thing — tell your fellow REALTORS® about it so they don’t get caught out of compliance.
Tags: compliance, Department of Justice, DOJ, NAR, National Association of Realtors
Matt,
I am interested to find out how this ruling will change the locally hosted MLS website for the general public searching data. Are they also required to implement “registration gateway”. Thanks. Merri
Yes, that’s exactly what it means. Anyone — big or small — who delivers listings to the public through our MLS (whether by using an IDX link or some other way) will be required to be in compliance with the new settlement agreement.
your marketing “blog” is a decent attempt to drum up sales for your company. I am not a big fan of peddling fear myself. The truth of the matter is, even most non performing sites are already DOJ compliant and perform to the letter of the law and they either have registration turned off as an option by the agent or the brokerage themselves. Simply requiring registration is not a huge undertaking for an agent to accomplish and truth be told the DOJ is doing most of the agents out there a favor by making registration mandatory. As far as free registration sites and websites are concerned any agent out there can get a blogspot website for absolutely nothing and have a page with registration up in hours and all they are out is minimal hosting expenses and an 8 dollar URL. Given their lengthy free tutorials and extensive help any agent regardless of age will have no problem setting up what they need with little to no hassle and be indebted to no one. They also will not be harassed to “upgrade” anything by a sales staff. I realize my post will fall more than likely on deaf eyes as I am sure you will delete this as it is not a pro post and this is little more than a poorly indexed marketing tool and not an actual blog. At any rate I hope at least one person gets to read it.