The CEO of Move, Inc. is pissed and he is letting the world know it. Mike Long’s companies include Realtor.com and Move.com and has been instrumental on managing the transition by real estate brokers from closed systems to systems that are able to be searched on the internet. Unfortunately, the next level of information sharing is going to be from proprietary to wide open, and it is a risk to the present business models.

But Mike Long does have a very good point, the media is characterizing his companies and the traditional real estate business structure as evil and everything new as good, and that is not fair. The problem when you live in an era of extrodinary change is that good people get hurt if they can not adapt quickly enough. It will be a tough transition, but 10 years from now we will look at real estate agents like we now look at travel agents. There is a place for them in the process, but the dominance and pricing power that they had will be severely diminished.

“I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore,” Long said Saturday during a speech to the National Association of Realtors’ board of directors at an annual legislative conference.
There is a mischaracterization in the media that popularizes the notion of a battle brewing between consumer-focused real estate-related companies and supposedly protectionist, Realtor-serving companies that want to maintain the status quo, Long said. The news media are willing proponents of this conspiracy theory, which he said “rivals that of the ‘Da Vinci Code,’” referring to a fictional movie and book that detail an ancient secret guarded through elaborate codes and clues.

Such conspiracies aside, Long said the industry is facing a very real battle to maintain control of the property listings information that so many other companies are chasing.

Some new industry participants promote their business models as consumer-friendly, and they may appear to be “charming and engaging” when they are in the presence of industry professionals, Long said, adding, “Privately and in non-industry forums, they detest you. They view Realtors as an anachronism that has outlived its usefulness.”

Powerful Internet portals and search engines, such as MSN, Yahoo!, Google and AOL, “are in a ferocious competition” to engage real estate consumers online, he said. It appears that companies “are positioning to re-enter the battle for control of the real estate consumer” and “will pursue multiple strategies indirectly through vertical search or directly through the industry because they increasingly believe that the industry will voluntarily give them access to the industry’s data.” via Inman Real Estate News

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