MIBOR - the Metropolitan Indianapolis Board of REALTORS has recently responded to a complaint regarding a violation of their IDX rules and regulations - specifically the "anti-scraping" regulations. MIBOR has correctly responded to the complaint ruling that an IDX property search page which allows data to be copied and re-purposed is in violation of their rules.  I begin this post with this acknowledgement to clarify that MIBOR is in no way behaving badly.  Indeed, they are enforcing their published rules and regulations correctly. This issue has created a very difficult situation for MIBOR, NAR, and the unfortunate member of MIBOR [...]

Microformats in plain english: Microformats is specific website coding standards (called Semantic information) that allows search engines to “read” the addresses and categories of inforamtion on your website, display the information in search results (like google maps), and allow the consumer to quickly download a vcard or address book card directly from the search result using a browser extension like Operator for firefox. As mentioned in the WAV Group White Paper on Localism - Geo Targeting strategies for real estate websites - search engines are often unable to view listings on most IDX Property Search solutions.  Companies like Trulia, Zillow, Loopnet and others real [...]

In 2005, WAV Group looked at Transaction Management adoption and wondered why it hadn’t taken off.  Everyone was saying they wanted it and everybody said it was a good idea, yet, the more we delved into it the more we found a lack of real adoption.  The study, which is still available for download here. identified many of the issues affecting adoption and why there was a gap between what the industry was saying and what the industry was doing. The study also made recommendations on the best ways to create adoption by rolling technology out in a series of steps [...]