Search Engine Optimization News Blog

According to SearchEngineLand,  the National Association of REALTORS® (NAR) is backing off of claims that Google is a ‘scraper site’, and has introduced new regulations and policies allowing real estate professionals to have their sites indexed by search engines.

A local decision in Indianapolis had said real estate agents couldn’t let Google or any other search engines index site listed property listings belonging to other brokers/agents. The Indianapolis board sent a letter out in March, calling search engines “scraper” sites

“…the National Association of REALTORS® (NAR) is in agreement with our interpretation of the policy that the above described practice of ‘indexing your Web site’ as you have called it, is a method of scraping or reproducing the data”

It was further reported that the National Association of REALTORS® (NAR), the Indianapolis Metropolitan Board of REALTORS® (MIBOR) had forced some of its members to stop allowing certain MLS listings to be crawled and indexed by Google or other search engines since they were considered “scraper” sites.

The Multiple Listing Service, or MLS is the controlling factor in this controversy, and agents began to fight to home listings belonging to others considered fair game, asking NAR to change its opinion on search engines at its national convention.

Many agents/brokers followed the practice of showing not only their own listings on a web site, but also listings from other agents and brokers sharing data through an Internet Data Exchange (IDX) system agreement. One of the rules affected the case directly:

Section 15.2.2 – participants must protect IDX information from misappropriation by employing reasonable efforts to monitor and prevent ’scraping’ or other unauthorized accessing, reproduction, or use of the BLC database”

(BLC is the Indianapolis version of MLS.)

After several agents complained,  MIBOR consulted with the NAR and the NAR confirmed the rule applied to search engines. A cease-and-desist letter was sent to the original complainant:

1. “…the National Association of REALTORS® (NAR) is in agreement with our interpretation of the policy that the above described practice of ‘indexing your Web site’ as you have called it, is a method of scraping or reproducing the data”
2. “Under IDX policy … participants have no authority to advertise those listings [from other participants] in any other way, including Internet search engines”

This could cause a lot of trouble trying to block bots just from certain areas of the website.  Google Maps already contained most of the information from real estate sites, that you’d expect to find on full-fledged real estate sites.

Fortunately, an appeal with this information worked – at their meeting this week, the NAR Board of Directors “amended the Multiple Listing and Internet Data Exchange Policy to conform to NAR virtual office Web site (VOW) policy and to make clear that participants may not use IDX-provided listings for purposes other than display on their Web sites but are not required to prevent indexing of their Web sites by recognized search engines.”