VOW Revisited

Let me remind those of you who have forgotten - I am not a lawyer. I don't play one on TV. I don't wish to be one. I'm happy with my little real estate semi-geek-girliness. I love the policies, the technologies and the heated arguments about the policies and technologies.

I asked the question yesterday on Twitter about an MLS wrapping IDX and VOW into one big, fat, happy rule of data display. To save myself some time I'm going to do a list of all the players who responded to this conversation and give links to their Twitter accounts:

• Steve Byrd
• Liam Dayan
• Mike Wurzer
• Mike DelGaudio
• Rob Haun
• Matt Lavallee
• David Harris

Here's the crux of the issue at hand for the day: Should (can) an MLS allow a broker to opt out of IDX if they are opting in to VOW?

Mike Wurzer wrote a blog post on his ultra-fab FBS Blog about requiring users to register on real estate websites. Liam also posted something about VOWs to the OnBoard blog a while back. Both blogs are relevant to this post and both are, as usual, awesome. I think very highly of both Mike and Liam (Liam isn't as vocal as Mike and some of the rest of us...if you haven't had a chance to check out his stuff, you should. He's a great guy, witty and very geeky - plus he lives near me and buys me lunch). Also, Rob Haun blogged about VOWs and, of course, there is Brian Larson's kick ass VOW stuff over on his blog.

It seems one of my favorite activities recently has been arguing with Matt Lavallee and I have sworn to him that I'll win this argument. That's a mighty bold statement from me so any support I can get will be financially rewarded, errrr...appreciated.

I am absolutely clear on the fact that a VOW is an online extension of the MLS. A VOW displays all the information which would be presented to a [insert popular term here: Customer, Client, Prospect] of a broker. This includes On and Off market listings, most fields, etc. I'm clear on the fact that if a seller opts out of VOW they can not have their listings on IDX sites such as other broker sites, Realtor.com or Trulia. And I'm not even going to argue at all about the benefits of advertising listings on the innerwebs - come on fellas, we all realize it's in most seller's best interests to get their property seen by everyone!!!

To reiterate the question: Can an MLS allow a broker to withhold a listing from IDX if that listing is part of a VOW?

It seems Mike Wurzer is the only one answering the question. Mike responded on Twitter, seeing the differences in the questions at hand. Here's how I see it:

if IDX_YN = Y, VOW_YN=Y

But...the converse of that is not necessarily true:

if VOW_YN = Y, IDX_YN = Y or IDX_YN = N

(yes, that is PQL -> PrincessQueryLanguage)

In other words...a seller can be opted in to VOW but opt out of IDX. Why would they want this? Who knows. Here's one example I can give: Tiger Woods owns property on Jupiter Island. Jupiter Island is 20 minutes and an entire world away from where I live but I am familiar with very exclusive real estate. Lots of high profile sellers don't even list their properties in the MLS but some do. I imagine if Tiger were selling his Jupiter Island property he wouldn't want that information being throw all over regular websites. I think I heard something when he first bought the property about people camping out in his driveway, people taking pics of other properties close to his just to say they had been somewhere near Tiger. I digress...my point here is I can understand Tiger wanting a potential buyer to have an established relationship (the Registration issue Mike and Liam addressed) with the broker who is acting on their behalf.

Apparently the North Carolina Association of Realtors doesn't see a difference between IDX and VOW. As I understand it, they lump them as INTERNET_DISPLAY_YN and a seller can't say Y to VOW but N to IDX. I don't know where that is defined in the policy from the NAR/DOJ settlement (check Brian Larson's blog again...it's easiest to read and isn't full of as much legal stuff as the actual settlement/policy stuff).

So there are my arguments and my reasoning on why a seller should be able to opt in to VOW and out of IDX. I sincerely hope to get comments about this as I haven't seen many on this specific topic and I find it interesting. And it wouldn't suck if I could get Matt Lavallee to agree with me.