Portland MLS Changes Rules on Address Display

October 6th, 2008

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.

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Related posts:

1. Estately Chooses Portland for 2nd Market Release
2. Portland’s Market Time Stats to Increase — Dramatically
3. Portland Real Estate Market Results - October 2008 Final

Entry Filed under: Market Activity, National News