DAVID STAEBLER
‘Pervasive’ misuse

Responding to consumer demand for instant information on for-sale homes, many real estate brokers have been developing Web sites, offering virtual house tours and aggressively marketing their listings online in recent years.

Many of them don’t know, however, the risks and unintended consequences associated with these technological innovations. In several weeks, Bay State Realtors will have a chance to learn all about the abuse and misuse of property listings on the Internet at a forum organized by the Massachusetts Association of Realtors.

The forum, “Shock & Awe: Are Your Internet Listings Safe?” will identify specific measures that real estate brokers can implement to protect their online listings and prevent Internet security breaches. The program will include a presentation by David Staebler, who is manager of industry relations for a TrendMLS, a multiple listing service that serves the Greater Philadelphia metropolitan region, northern Delaware, southeastern Pennsylvania and south central New Jersey.

“The Internet is so new and changes so quickly that I don’t think that many real estate brokers have a real good handle on just exactly how to harness it or just exactly what to do with it,” said Staebler, who has made similar presentations to Realtor groups in Pennsylvania and gave a 15-minute talk at the National Association of Realtors’ annual convention last year.

“With the Internet being such a major part of our business today, we really need to know what happens to our listings when they appear on the Internet, and that is why this particular forum is critical for Realtors,” added MAR President Judy Moore, a broker with Re/Max Premier Properties in Lexington.

Few Controls

The MAR forum will show participants “what can happen when a listing is posted on the Internet, and how it may appear on another Internet site without permission and how it can then be sold back to the listing broker in the form of a referral fee,” according to Moore.

“This particular forum is designed to show us the steps to take to avoid these situations and keep our listings secure on our Web sites,” she said.

While Realtors should be concerned about the theft of property listings, “it’s the misuse [of property listings] that is quite pervasive, and subtle and difficult to track and difficult to stop,” explained Staebler.

One reason listings could end up on a Web site without a broker’s knowledge or permission is because real estate brokers often use companies to develop and set up their Web sites. The Web site developer gains access to the listings, which often come from a multiple listing service, and if there are other clients that can benefit from the data, the vendor may convince the real estate broker to share the data with this third party. The third party may not even be a licensed real estate broker.

That’s why it’s critical for multiple listings services to have strong licensing agreements to protect real estate brokers’ listings, said Staebler. “If I’m a real estate broker with 100 listings, I think that I have the right to say where I want my listings to be and where I don’t want them to be,” he noted.

It’s also important, according to Staebler, for real estate brokers to monitor their agents’ Web sites and to implement policies that ensure that the real estate company and broker’s name accompanies listings that may be featured on their agents’ Web pages – just as in newspaper and other print advertisements.

In his presentation to MAR members, Staebler said he wants to stress that “this is your data and you should decide who else you want to have it.”

“It is not always the case that the more places your data is, the more it accrues to your benefit. In some cases, your data can appear in places that can cost you money,” he said.

Some real estate brokers and third-party aggregators, for example, will seek a referral fee from a listing broker if an online visitor inquires about one of the broker’s listings.

Most of the misuse of property listings on the Internet is unintentional, according to Matthew J. Ferrara, chief executive officer and founder of Matthew Ferrara Seminars in Methuen.

Ferrara said that one of the most common reasons that data ends up in places not intended is that agents buy ads with services, including real estate publications, that have agreements to share data with other Web sites. Sometimes agents aren’t aware of those agreements, he said.

“This is very risky for Realtors for a few reasons,” said Ferrara, in an e-mail. “They may not have control over how the ads are maintained, updated, [or] removed if sold.”

In cases like that, Realtors also won’t have control over placement of the ad, and the ad could appear near an advertisement for a competitor’s mortgage company, explained Ferrara.

Another danger is that the homeowner may not have wanted the property listing to appear anywhere other than the Realtors’ personal and company Web site.

Listing data can also end up in the wrong hands because real estate brokers now have feeds that bring the entire multiple listing service data onto their sites. Yet many of them “have very few programming controls” to prevent unauthorized use, said Ferrara.

“So much of the listing data is just pushed out onto the Web with no data controls to prevent its easy capture,” he said. “Worse, many broker sites are programmed with the simplest of codes, using a mere ‘frame’ to surround a data feed from the MLS that can easily be redirected/tapped and reframed by any ‘less savory’ persons who wish to put that data on their site and make it look like their own. And almost no broker that I’m aware of actively checks to see who’s linking to them, how, and what they are doing with their data.”

Overall, however, Ferrara said listing misuse “is not a huge issue” on the Web. More frequently, Ferrara hears complaints about real estate brokers who may not have a lot of their own listings trying to attract homebuyers by showing or forwarding other listing brokers’ listings and removing the listing broker information to make it appear that the listing is their own.

“I hear this story a lot,” said Ferrara. “It’s because some agents don’t understand the difference between MLS systems, which permit the exchange of data between Realtors and the providing of a listing sheet to a consumer with minimal evidence of the actual listing broker and the Internet which publicly displays marketing data. Using it like the MLS is not the same: Agents cannot use another broker’s site to get inventory and also remove their logo/broker information because they want to send it to a buyer they wish to get as a client.”

The MAR forum will take place Thursday, March 11, from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. at the Radisson Hotel in Rockland and from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. at the Royal Plaza Hotel in Marlborough. The cost is $15. Those who want to register can call MAR at (800) 725-6272 or visit the association’s event calendar section at www.marealtor.com.