The integration of Dropbox into Imprev’s Marketing Center makes it easier for agents to collaborate with others to bring photos, video and documents into their marketing materials, the company said.

Professional photographers, for example, can upload photos to a shared folder within the Marketing Center for brokers and agents to use in their campaigns.

Imprev’s Marketing Center is a mobile-optimized platform with single-property websites, YouTube-enabled videos, and prewritten email, print and social media ad campaigns.

Dropbox, the cloud-based document storage platform,  allows users to share files and folders with others, and to modify and access them in real time. Dropbox is free for users who need up to 2 gigabytes of storage, $9.99 per month for storage up to 100 GB, and more for higher storage limits.

In April, Imprev rolled out a bilingual (French and English) marketing platform for the 14,500 agents affiliated with the Ontario-based franchisor Royal LePage Real Estate Services.

In January, a selection of Imprev’s tools became available to agents affiliated with the Denver-based franchisor Re/Max.

In August the firm introduced a video creation platform that takes music and a listing’s photos and puts them in a video.

Getting people to visit your website presents its own unique challenges: the right keywords, top notch website infrastructure, modern design, exceptional content, responsive architecture and consistent promotion are all part of the mix. But what happens when someone gets to your site is really where the action starts. Calls-to-action or CTAs as many marketers call them are some of the most important elements of online marketing and lead generation.

We generally use the term call-to-action to describe the instructions we give website visitors to guide their behavior. Note that CTAs are not limited to websites: your emails, flyers, Facebook posts, advertisements and conversations all include calls-to-action whether conscious or unconscious. Calls-to-action can be as simple as the links in this post, a request to tweet this or something more direct, like a forced lead capture pop-up requesting a sign-in to read more. We’ve all experienced the situation where we’ve willingly given our personal information in exchange for access to content or some newfangled app that we just had to have. Those are all different variations on a theme: The offer of value, real or perceived, in exchange for personal action.

The reason this is so important is because in business, as in life, things don’t happen just because you want them to. You need to ask for what you want and align your actions to make it possible for your dream to become a reality. Now, you just can’t go around demanding that your website visitors do what you want, but with an understanding of your audience you can create a clear vision of the actions that would be the best fit for their desires and your business. Understanding the customer is key here: it’s the only way to tailor your communication to their needs. What are they searching for, what motivates them and more importantly, what will it take to earn their trust and get their permission to interact with them?

That’s where the CTAs come in. Once a visitor starts engaging on your website, they are providing valuable insight into their interests and motivation. Using Google Analytics, you can learn a lot about your visitors even without knowing exactly who they are. When they give you their contact information they are giving you an opportunity to communicate in a more personal and direct manner. This opportunity is the first of many tests that you will have to pass in the consumer’s eye. Remember: don’t come on too strong, you haven’t earned it yet. For more insight into CTAs, we’ve put together a visual guide outlining 14 tips for calls-to-action and why they’re crucial for your online marketing.

Let us know what’s working for you. What are your most successful calls-to-action? Are there any you have been reluctant to try? Lastly, if you’re willing to share, post a link to an example that you find exceptionally effective. (Again, another call-to-action.) You get the idea, now leave a comment!

The finance analysis website Department of Numbers shows that the number of existing homes for sale is up 17.7 percent so far this year, about triple the percentage growth from the beginning of the year in 2011 and 2012 at the same period, according to the finance and economics blog Calculated Risk.

The quick rise in inventory of existing homes, which represent about 90 percent of homes on the market, leads Bill McBride, who runs the Calculated Risk, to say that an inventory bottom is near. In April, he thought the bottom would happen sometime in 2014.

Source: Calculated Risk

Automatic federal spending cuts that took effect March 1 will force the Department of Housing and Urban Development to close up shop on seven business days this year. HUD offices nationwide will be closed Friday, May 24, reopening Tuesday, May 28 following Memorial Day. If Congress does not take action to restore HUD’s funding, future “furlough days” will also be paired with weekends and holidays to ease their impact. Source: hud.gov.

Shares in realtor.com operator Move Inc. surged more than 10 percent today after Citron Research — the company that briefly sent shares in Zillow on a roller coaster ride last year with a skeptical 18-page research report — revealed on Twitter that it’s long on Move.

Another possible reason for the upsurge: The board of directors of the National Association of Realtors voted Saturday to hold a special meeting in July to discuss giving realtor.com — the official listing site of NAR — more leeway to compete with rivals like Zillow and Trulia. Source: seekingalpha.com.

Imprev Inc., the Bellevue, Wash.-based developer of marketing tools for real estate brokers and agents, has integrated Dropbox into its marketing platform.

Imprev’s Marketing Center is a mobile-optimized platform with single-property websites, YouTube-enabled videos, and prewritten email, print and social media ad campaigns.

Dropbox, the cloud-based document storage platform,  allows users to share files and folders with others, and to modify and access them in real time. Dropbox is free for users who need up to 2 gigabytes of storage, $9.99 per month for storage up to 100 GB, and more for higher storage limits.

Integration of Dropbox into Imprev’s Marketing Center eases collaboration. Professional photographers, for example, can upload photos to a shared folder within the Marketing Center, allowing brokers and agents instant access to create campaigns and marketing materials.

In April, Imprev rolled out a bilingual (French and English) marketing platform for the 14,500 agents affiliated with the Ontario-based franchisor Royal LePage Real Estate Services.

In January, a selection of Imprev’s tools became available to agents affiliated with the Denver-based franchisor Re/Max.

In August the firm introduced a video creation platform that takes music and a listing’s photos and puts them in a video.

You update your clothing and your technology, but have you updated your marketing? If you’re still using the same old outdated tactics from five, 10 or even 20 years ago, it’s time to freshen up those old approaches with a new look for 2013.

With all the buzz about video, mobile and social media, it’s easy to get caught up in the never-ending chase for the latest shiny new object. On the other hand, it’s also just as easy to become complacent and to keep on doing what you have always done.

The challenge is that if you constantly chase what’s new, you don’t develop consistent systems. On the other hand, if you don’t adapt regularly, you’ll be left behind by the agents who do.

So how can a busy agent like you determine what needs a remake? Here are some useful tips.

1. Real estate is, and always will be, a face-to-face business

Does calling on owners of expired listings, for-sale-by-owners (FSBOs) and door knocking still work? Absolutely! These tried and true techniques that put you in direct contact with owners are as effective today as they were 50 years ago.

You can use technology to identify listings that have expired or are available as a FSBO, but ultimately, there’s no substitute for face-to-face interaction. In fact, the NAR statistics on this point haven’t changed for many years. The large majority of buyers and sellers are most likely to do business with the agent they have seen most recently face to face.

2. If everyone else is doing it, do something different

Are you using this hackneyed old phrase, “I’m never too busy for your referrals”? If so, stop! This phrase has been so overused that it’s simply not effective any longer.

Today’s consumer wants your communication to be about them, not about you, how busy you are, or how much you have sold in the last month or year.

Moreover, if you are using a mailing program that is being used by other agents in your area or if you are marketing your listings using “Just Listed” or “Just Sold” cards with your picture on them, it’s time to stop that, too. The best way to update your look is to do something unique that differentiates you from the pack of agents who are all marketing the same way.

To illustrate how to stand out, one of our private coaching clients recently contacted several of her neighbors regarding a buyer who was looking in her neighborhood. Her mailing campaign yielded one showing that really wasn’t right for her buyer.

While most agents would have thanked the owners for the showing, this agent did something that made her stand out. She personally delivered a box of beautiful Danish cookies to say “thank you.”

It is this personal touch coupled with doing something more than what is expected that will make you memorable in a sea of forgettable marketing pieces.

3. Three trends that are here to stay

Like it or not, there are three trends that you must address in the very near future if you want to continue to stay relevant to today’s tech-savvy, mobile-based consumer. Those three trends are going paperless, having a “responsive” website, and incorporating video into your marketing.

If you haven’t shifted to becoming paperless, the sooner you make the move, the better. Before you adopt any new technology, a key question you must always ask is, “Will this new technology improve my productivity?” In the case of going paperless, there is no doubt that it will yield huge returns for years to come.

Systems such as DocuSign, Cartavi and dotloop make it possible for you to store all your marketing materials, contracts and other related transaction documents in a single place. A great place to begin this transition is to start working with digital signatures.

Cartavi and DocuSign are now integrated so you can conduct all these functions easily from your iPad or other tablet PC. In fact, the DocuSign phone app (DocuSign Ink) is much faster and simpler to use than the desktop version. Merely photograph your signature, upload it to the app, and no fax machine needed.

The second trend is becoming “responsive.” This means that you have a website or blog that automatically senses the type of device where your site is being viewed. Your site then shifts the display to fit the appropriate size screen. No finger expanding or shrinking required.

The third trend is video. If 90 percent of the traffic on the Web will be video by 2014, now is the time to make the shift. Whether you hire a professional or take fun videos yourself, remember to focus on what matters to the consumer.

Ultimately, the goal for your marketing remake is to make people who receive your marketing materials feel that “this agent understands me and my lifestyle.” That’s the real secret to any type of marketing success. Use the new technologies to maintain contact, but never let them become a substitute for what matters most: personal connection.

Bernice Ross, CEO of RealEstateCoach.com, is a national speaker, trainer and author of the National Association of Realtors’ No. 1 best-seller, “Real Estate Dough: Your Recipe for Real Estate Success.” Hear Bernice’s five-minute daily real estate show, just named “new and notable” by iTunes, at www.RealEstateCoachRadio.com.

Proposed immigration reform could pump more than half a trillion dollars into the U.S. economy by paving the way for about 3 million Hispanics to buy homes over a five-year period, according to an estimate released by the National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals (NAHREP).

In addition to generating $500 billion in home sales, income and spending, immigration reform would also create demand for an additional $233 billion in loan origination fees, real estate commissions and consumer spending associated with homeownership, NAHREP said.

Real estate agents would collect an additional $28 billion in commissions as a result of home purchases sparked by immigration reform, NAHREP estimates.

NAHREP said it based its projections on updated data and methodology used for a 2004 study, “The Potential for Homeownership Among Undocumented Workers.”

“Foreign-born householders have a high value and strong desire for homeownership,” NAHREP President Juan Martinez said in a statement. “They have been here in our midst for years, working and participating in our economy. Legitimizing them through immigration reforms would finally give them the access and the confidence to buy homes.”

Hispanic buyers are a significant and growing source of demand for housing. The number of Hispanic homeowners grew 58 percent between 2000 and 2012, from 4.24 million to 6.69 million, compared with a net increase of 5 percent for the remainder of the U.S. population, according to a report released by NAHREP in March.

Researchers with the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University have documented how a sharp decrease in immigration — coupled with a decline in household formation, particularly among those under age 35 — helped keep a lid on household growth between 2007 and 2011.

NAHREP estimates Hispanics accounted for 51 percent of all household formation in 2012, generating 355,000 new households. In 2010, 10.4 percent of all U.S. homeowners were Hispanic, NAHREP reported.

Alex Nowrasteh, an immigration policy analyst at the Cato Institute, said that the role of immigration in real estate prices is “an often ignored component” of the housing market.

For example, he said that immigration laws passed in Arizona in recent years exacerbated the state’s housing collapse by sweeping undocumented workers out of their homes. Though most undocumented workers rent, both renter and homeowner vacancy rates shot up after passage of these laws, helping to drive down home prices, according to a paper he authored on the topic.

NAHREP’s recent estimate, which assumes that past purchase trends among foreign-born householders will remain consistent, predicts that about 6 million of 11 million undocumented workers would pursue legalization. Of those, up to 3 million would seek to purchase a home after obtaining legal status, NAHREP said.

Many foreign-born, undocumented households have age and income characteristics associated with homeownership, NAHREP said. With incomes averaging about $40,000 a year, up to 3 million could afford homes worth $173,600, the national median sales price of a home, the trade group said.

“If we can get past the anti-immigrant sentiment that has so strongly colored the national conversation around immigration reform, we will see just how much our U.S. economy has to gain by legitimizing these people,” Martinez said.

Opponents of more lenient immigration policies say that an influx of new citizens could strain programs like Social Security and Medicare, although those claims are hotly debated.

Overseas buyers who account for half of new-home purchases in London are helping drive nearly $1 billion in sales in Circus West at Battersea Powerstation, a new neighborhood of 866 homes that will break ground in July, Bloomberg reports.

The project is part of London’s largest redevelopment area, which is centered around a decommissioned coal-fired power plant on the south bank of the River Thames. By 2030, as many as 16,000 new homes are expected to be constructed around Battersea Powerstation.

The old power plant, which was featured on the cover of Pink Floyd’s 1977 album, “Animals,” is said to said to be the largest brick building in Europe. A new U.S. embassy is also planned for the Vauxhall Nine Elms Battersea Opportunity Area, which will be served by an extension of London’s underground transit system. Source: bloomberg.com.

Adweek has named Realtor Rafael A. Perez “San Diego’s worst rapper.” According to Adweek’s “Adfreak,” which celebrates “the best and worst of advertising, branding and design,” “Today, everyone does everything.” So when Perez “decided to produce a rap video to ‘express the state of real estate’ there, who was going to stop him?” How’s the saying go — any publicity is good publicity? Source: adweek.com.

Yahoo has confirmed that it is buying the social media blogging site Tumblr for $1.1 billion. The site reportedly will operate autonomously after it is acquired by Yahoo. Source: TechCrunch

Mike Gardner isn’t going to bother making a stand-alone site for one of his listings. All he needs for the luxury Malibu, Calif., mobile home, he said, is a Pinterest board.

“My marketing campaign now is to pay for ads on Facebook and Google and point them to this site,” he said. “I’ve decided to skip the traditional property site, as people seem far more interested in sharing this.”

Gardner recently created a Pinterest board brimming with exquisite photos of one of his listings. He said the board — which won out among last week’s #madREskillz entries — sparked two showing requests “within three minutes” after he posted it on Facebook.

And less than two weeks after he produced it, he said he is drafting an offer and has averaged a showing every other day.

Gardner originally decided to create the Pinterest board after observing how active his wife and her friends are on the image-driven social media site.

“I shoot professionally and knew that if I took some magazine-style shots and mixed them with wide-angle shots, I could create a ‘board’ that people would want to share,” he said.

Gardner chose to add a mix of wide-angle and vertical shots to the board, allowing him to showcase both the home’s intricate details as well as its space and surroundings. To do so, he used a digital single-lens reflex camera with a wide-angle lens and two flashes for the expansive shots, and a Samsung Galaxy S3 for “the detail shots … done in a style like what you’d see in a magazine.”

Gardner admitted that Pinterest isn’t necessarily the holy grail of marketing tools for all properties. A home probably needs to have impressive details that are worth spotlighting, he said.

But for those listings that boast some striking features, Pinterest can deliver some serious bang for your buck, he said. The boards are a breeze to create, not to mention free, he said.

And for his mobile home listing, it cost him just $6 worth of promotion on Facebook to garner 75 followers, generate a number of showings, and even attract an offer.

“This was even a lesson for me as a photographer to start thinking more about the details of the home,” he said.

Contact people mentioned in this story: Mike Gardner

Have you found Pinterest to be an effective marketing tool?  

WASHINGTON — The National Association of Realtors’ board of directors will hold a special meeting in July to explore whether to give realtor.com operator Move Inc. more freedom to compete with other websites like Zillow and Trulia.

“Cut the chains. Let them soar,” said Danny Frank, a NAR director and chairman of the Houston Association of Realtors, before today’s vote approving the special board meeting. “Let’s make this happen soon.”

The special meeting will take place July 23, 24 or 25th in Chicago, and NAR will cover directors’ expenses.

The resolution passed today states that the NAR leadership team will work with Move and its subsidiary RealSelect to develop recommendations for consideration by NAR’s board “to enrich and broaden the user experience” on NAR’s official website, realtor.com. The recommendations will be presented to the board at the closed meeting in July.

Briefing Realtor association executives Wednesday, NAR CEO Dale Stinton said the information available to consumers on realtor.com and third-party sites is “wildly different” because an operating agreement between NAR and Move restricts realtor.com from providing some  content that makes third-party sites popular with consumers.

NAR’s board of directors and Move can update the realtor.com operating agreement, which dates to 1996 and was last amended in 2010.

“We (NAR leadership) ultimately do what they (the board) tell us to do or not to do. Realtor.com would look like other sites if we would let (Move) do it,” Stinton said Wednesday.

NAR and Move characterized changes made to the agreement in 2010 as having paved the way for innovation, by streamlining the process for developing improvements to realtor.com.

Some details of the Sept. 10, 2010, amendment were kept confidential, but became clear when Move announced the following year that it would run lead forms for buyer’s agents on realtor.com listing detail pages not unlike those employed by rivals Zillow and Trulia.

The “Connection for co-brokers” program, which provides perks like additional listing photos to participating brokers, proved controversial. Although brokerages can opt out of the program, last year HomeServices of America Inc. subsidiary Edina Realty Inc. announced it was pulling listings from realtor.com altogether, in part because it objected to the lead forms.

Addressing NAR’s board of directors today, Samuelson said realtor.com had “nailed” the No. 1 thing that consumers want in a real estate site: fresh and up-to-date data.

But the No. 2 thing they want is comprehensiveness. “That’s a challenge for us,” he said.

Samuelson said that less than a third of rental content (29 percent) is appearing on realtor.com “because of members’ wishes.” He noted that if he’s looking for new construction in Austin, he gets 41 properties if he goes to realtor.com, but more than 2,500 properties at New Home Source.

“We own 51 percent of that company. We could put that content on realtor.com” if members allow it, he said. “We have 17 years of history of winning and competing, but we need your help to make the site not just accurate, but comprehensive.”

Samuelson later told Inman News he was pleased by the board’s enthusiasm to improve consumer user experience on realtor.com.

“If you take what we’re already doing, especially on the technology front,” and add comprehensive content, “I think it’s going to be incredibly powerful. I’m jazzed,” he said.

Samuelson said NAR and Move were “pretty aligned” where realtor.com is concerned — they meet weekly via conference call, he said. “But I think this is going to energize the members. It’s great to have the members feeling that passion, that they have a stake in this,” he said.

He added that some Inman News articles this week had prompted calls from investors, concerned about Move’s relationship with NAR.

“We were able to explain to them the partnership has been strong, is strong,” he said.

Samuelson will be attending the special meeting in July.

This month, realtor.com announced that it’s started tracking information at the property level, allowing it to display information tied to specific properties like tax information, sale history and price changes, and collect housing data on a more frequent basis.

Move has also signed an agreement with Xceligent Inc. to bring “hundreds of thousands” of commercial listings to realtor.com by the third quarter of 2013, the companies said Wednesday.

Reporting by Inman News Associate Editor Andrea V. Brambila.

WASHINGTON — The National Association of Realtors today adopted a policy that spells out “basic” services multiple listing services can charge all members for — including the operation and promotion of public-facing websites that allow consumers to search for homes for sale.

Many MLSs already operate public-facing websites. But some large brokerages objected to NAR taking a formal stance that MLSs that choose to provide those and other services can require members to pay for them, regardless of whether they want them or use them.

At NAR’s midyear meeting in Washington, D.C., Thursday, a policy committee signed off on an amendment to NAR’s model MLS rules to classify not only the operation, but the promotion of public-facing MLS sites, as a “basic” service.

But NAR’s Executive Committee, which makes recommendations to NAR’s board of directors, stripped language addressing public-facing MLS sites from the amendment on Friday. The move — which some said was made to appease large brokerages that object to MLSs operating public-facing websites — surprised some members of the Multiple Listing Issues and Policies Committee.

The amendment put forward by NAR’s Executive Committee failed to pass today. After a lengthy debate, the amendment was voted down, 275-341. NAR’s board of directors then adopted the amendment originally put forward by the Multiple Listing Issues and Policies Committee, without further debate.

By passing the amendment as originally put forward Thursday, NAR’s board of directors has given MLSs around the country more leeway to decide whether to charge members for operating and promoting public-facing websites.

Bill Lublin, vice chairman of the Multiple Listing Issues and Policies Committee, noted on Thursday that the amendment was not intended to either promote or impede the use of public-facing MLS websites, but to allow MLSs to make decisions on a local basis.

Shad Bogany, a NAR director and chairman of the Texas Association of Realtors, said the board’s decision would allow associations to consider public-facing websites without fear that they will be out of compliance with NAR MLS policy.

Craig Cheatham, president and CEO of the Realty Alliance, an association of 70 U.S. brokers, said he was disappointed by the board’s vote.  The debate became a referendum on whether MLSs should have public-facing websites rather than focusing on whether the policy itself was sound, he said.

He predicted lawsuits and disputes would arise from within the industry because of questions regarding tying the MLS website service to MLS participation given that public websites are now classified as a basic, not optional, service that MLSs may oblige members to pay for regardless of use.

“This is not a big broker issue,” he said. “No broker is wanting to be charged for something by the MLS that they do not want and do not use.”

Bob Hale, CEO of the Houston Association of Realtors, supported including public-facing sites as a basic MLS service, but said he would have been content with sites as an optional service, so long as they were included in the policy. But regardless, he said, “In most markets I can’t imagine any broker would choose to opt out” if their MLS had a public-facing site.

The amendment of MLS Policy Statement 7.57, “Categorization of MLS Services, Information and Products,” approved today, started out as a proposed rule change to allow MLSs and Realtor associations to charge members for providing lockboxes as a “basic” service.

Because of antitrust concerns, NAR has required that MLSs and Realtor associations categorize lockbox services as “optional” — meaning they could not require members to pay for lockbox services unless they actually used them.

The amended policy will allow MLSs and Realtor associations in  most parts of the country to classify lockbox and other services now considered “optional” as “basic” services that all members pay for, as long as the MLS or Realtor association is not making a profit in providing those services.

In some parts of the country, courts have ruled against this “economic interest” exemption from antitrust issues, or there is no precedent allowing it. States and territories where MLSs and Realtor associations will not be allowed to treat lockboxes and other services now considered as “optional” as “basic”  include Arkansas, Connecticut, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New York, North Dakota, Puerto Rico, Rhode Island, South Dakota and Vermont.

The amended policy also lists services that MLSs and Realtor associations in all states will be allowed to classify as “basic,” and provide to all members:

• sold and comparable information.
• pending sales information.
• expired listings and “off market” information.
• tax records.
• zoning records/information.
• title/abstract information.
• mortgage information.
• amortization schedules.
• mapping capabilities.
• statistical information.
• public accommodation information (such as schools, shopping, churches, transportation, entertainment, recreational facilities).
• MLS computer training/orientation.
• access to affinity programs.
• establishment, maintenance and promotion of public-facing websites.

Reported by Inman News Associate Editor Andrea V. Brambila.

WASHINGTON — The committee that sets the agenda for the National Association of Realtors’ board of directors approved a motion to recommend the board have a special meeting to discuss the trade group’s official website, realtor.com, and third-party aggregators, NAR CEO Dale Stinton told attendees at a forum for executive officers of state associations today at NAR’s Midyear Legislative Meetings and Trade Expo.

Subject to approval at Saturday’s board meeting, Stinton said the special meeting would take place sometime in the next 70 days and would be open only to NAR directors who would be asked to sign nondisclosure agreements to participate and would not be allowed to bring in electronic devices. “Certainly no press” would be allowed, he said.

Because realtor.com is operated by a public company, Move Inc., directors need a “safe place” to discuss realtor.com, third-party aggregation, “and what the board of directors would like us (NAR leadership) to do about it,” Stinton said.

To give forum attendees an idea of how sensitive discussing a public company can be, Stinton said his own comments about realtor.com at NAR’s Association Executive Committee meeting on Wednesday had gotten out and prompted calls from hedge fund managers.

“Two hedge fund managers wanted me on the phone to talk about what was going on with realtor.com,” he said. “(Move’s) stock price moved 50 cents in 10 minutes. Fifty cents on a $10 stock is no joke.”

Move’s stock price did take a tumble on Thursday morning, though what caused it is unclear. The price closed at $10.56 Wednesday and dropped to a low of $9.91 in trading Thursday morning before recovering to close at $10.48. The stock’s highest price this month was $11.32 on May 2; the price has ranged from a low of $6.92 to a high of $12.12 in the past 52 weeks.

“Lest you think we’re all friends in the room, you have to assume everything is public record,” Stinton told forum attendees. He referred to comments he made Wednesday at a well-attended meeting of NAR’s Association Executives Committee.

The day before, he had declared NAR leaders were “ready to get into trouble“ by considering controversial issues surrounding the trade group’s structure — including changing its relationship to realtor.com. Members taking part in NAR’s REThink Initiative about the industry’s future suggested NAR “take back realtor.com” and revamp it to compete with other national aggregators. Stinton responded that “maybe realtor.com needs to get sorted out and maybe that will happen here at the board of directors meeting” on Saturday.

At the Wednesday meeting, Stinton spoke on a panel, “Competitive Forces on the Internet.” He said realtor.com is approaching its 17th or 18th birthday and for the first 14 years, it kept everyone else out of the space.

“Then about four or five years ago, an interesting thing happened: Our members started giving away the listings. (They said) ‘I want (them) everywhere.’ It was the beginning of the new era,” he said.

Third-party aggregators — whom Stinton would not name, saying he was tired of giving them free publicity — began to dominate. And there will be others, he said.

“There’s a lot of money sloshing around out there looking for a place to go,” he said.

Stinton said he is “still amazed” at how wrong the industry was about interpreting consumer wants.

“We thought quality would win over quantity. We thought being the best would keep you the best,” Stinton told attendees. But “the consumer has spoken rather loudly and said, ‘I’m not that deep. I want to be entertained, play around. When I get serious about it, I might go to realtor.com because I know it has accurate data, but I’m a long way from being serious about it.’”

He compared realtor.com to public television where consumers go when they want to learn something.

“But 99 percent of my time I’m spending watching the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills,” he said.

Fellow panelist Jim Harrison, president and CEO of Silicon Valley-based MLSListings Inc., said third-party aggregators have evolved to offer content and innovation — much of which the industry resists.

“What started with home valuations are now moving to matching consumers with brokers and agents,” Harrison said.

“We were innovative in the 90s, but we’re not innovative anymore.”

In contrast to realtor.com. third-party aggregators are agile, Harrison said.

“We’ve taken our baby, realtor.com, and we’ve shackled her. Realtor.com is not going to be able to compete the way it needs to as long as it’s weighted down with our bureaucracy,” he said.

Fellow panelist Diane Ruggiero, CEO of the Kansas City Regional Association of Realtors, agreed.

“We have a lack of estimates on there. Some of us still don’t allow sold data on there. Some even don’t allow addresses. We are our own worst enemy in this battle,” she said.

“We are what keeps realtor.com from being effective. It’s us. It’s the MLSs. It’s the organizations,” she added.

Some Realtors have come to believe that realtor.com is a member benefit and should be free, she said.

“But realtor.com is part of a publicly traded company. It takes money” to operate, she said.

Stinton noted that the content of realtor.com and third-party sites is “wildly different” because an operating agreement between NAR and Move prohibits Move from incorporating content similar to those of third-party sites. It would be up to NAR’s board of directors to change that agreement.

“We (NAR leadership) ultimately do what they (the board) tell us to do or not to do. Realtor.com would look like other sites if we would let (Move) do it,” Stinton said.

The realtor.com operating agreement, which dates to 1996, was last amended in 2010, after Move initiated negotiations that dragged on for several months and ultimately involved a mediator. At the time, NAR and Move characterized changes to the agreement as paving the way for innovation, by streamlining the process for developing improvements to realtor.com.

But some details of the Sept. 10, 2010, amendment to the realtor.com operating agreement were kept confidential. The nature of the amendment’s confidential provisions became clear only when Move announced the following year that it would run lead forms for buyer’s agents on realtor.com listing detail pages similar to those employed by rivals Zillow and Trulia.

Although brokers could opt out of the “Connection for co-brokers” program, it proved controversial. Last year, HomeServices of America Inc. subsidiary Edina Realty Inc., the leading brokerage in the Minneapolis-St. Paul market, announced it was pulling listings from realtor.com.

Stinton today characterized the relationship between NAR and Move as a “forced marriage,” and described to state association executives what he called “the rules of the game.”

“One, there ain’t no getting anybody else,” Stinton said. “It’s an evergreen agreement that goes on forever. If you didn’t know that before, you know it now. Two, in 17 years, we never put a penny into realtor.com. In fact, they pay us … royalty to use the term ‘realtor.com.’”

(According to the company’s most recent annual report to investors, Move’s payments to NAR under the terms of the realtor.com operating agreement and “certain other advertising agreements” total $2 million a year.)

That money goes into enforcing NAR’s rules on the site because there have been some Move leaders that would like to have ignored the rules, Stinton said.

Ultimately, he said, the consumer will always win. He invited attendees to imagine a scenario where realtor.com had both innovative content and the most accurate listings.

“Then I think we get the consumer back. They want to have fun. They want to be delighted. And they would like to know it’s really accurate, too.”

When asked if that’s what he would recommend, Stinton said, “I don’t want to say what I think should happen, but I want to tell you all that if there was ever a point in time to find your voice on these issues, now is the time. You (association executives) influence your members greatly in all these debates.

“We serve at the pleasure of the board of directors of this association. It has to tell us what to do and if it doesn’t we won’t do anything. But I will promise you, if the board of directors says, ‘Change it. Fix it,’ we will fix it and we’ll come to you and say, ‘This is how we’re going to fix it,’ and you can tell us if we got it right.”

Errol Samuelson, Move’s chief strategy officer and head of realtor.com, will present at tomorrow’s board of directors meeting.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated with details on the 2010 amendment to the realtor.com operating agreement.

WASHINGTON – A committee in charge of recommending policies to the National Association of Realtors’ board of directors has removed language from a controversial policy amendment that would have allowed multiple listing services to charge all members for the costs of establishing and promoting public-facing websites.

NAR’s Executive Committee has pulled language stipulating that the “establishment, maintenance or promotion of public-facing websites” be included on a list of services that MLSs should be allowed to define as “basic,” according to NAR Director Shad Bogany, chairman of the Texas Association of Realtors.

Bogany serves as a member of the Multiple Listing Issues and Policies Committee, which on Thursday approved a proposed amendment to NAR’s model MLS rules that would have made that and other changes.

The Executive Committee said it would recommend revisiting the issue of public-facing websites at NAR’s annual meeting in November, Bogany said.

None of the other changes the MLS committee made to the policy amendment yesterday were removed, he added.

Bogany is not on the Executive Committee, but said he was told of the committee’s decision from a committee member. He declined to reveal the member’s name, saying members must sign confidentiality agreements to participate. NAR’s Executive Committee reviews policy recommendations from the trade group’s other committees and recommends to the board of directors new policies, changes in policy, or the repeal of existing policies.

The amendment goes to NAR’s board of directors for a vote Saturday morning.

As a member of the board, Bogany said he would push to get the public website provision put back on the amendment, bring it to the floor and have the board vote on the amendment as it was when it came out of the MLS policy committee.

Bogany said he was stunned that the Executive Committee did not make public-facing websites even an “optional” service that MLSs could offer to members and charge only those who use it, but rather removed any mention of public-facing websites at all.

“That’s what the big brokers wanted all along,” Bogany said.

“They used the other items as a smokescreen,” he added, referring to a debate about whether lockboxes should be categorized as a basic or optional service.

A small minority of large brokers want all consumer leads to go through them, so they can show agents more value and charge more fees, Bogany said.

“It’s all about making more money,” he said.

Those brokers are under the mistaken belief that if there were no public-facing MLS websites, consumer traffic would flow to them, Bogany said, but studies have shown that’s not the case even if a broker is dominant in their market.

“The consumers are still going to realtor.com and the Zillows and Trulias of the world because they want a neutral place to go. They don’t want to go to your site and think you’re trying to sell them something. They perceive these third-party aggregators are neutral,” he said.

“They might believe if they go to my site they’re seeing only my listings. They might think these third-party sites have all the listings. (And) they don’t want me calling them unless they want to be called.”

The change is not what’s best for the agent or the consumer, Bogany said.

Consumers want their listings everywhere, he said, and agents want their MLSs to help them be profitable.

“It is about the consumer and it is about the membership and that’s what bothers me: Nobody’s speaking about what’s best for the consumer or what’s best for the members who we’ve been elected to come up here and represent,” Bogany said.

Craig Cheatham, president and CEO of the Realty Alliance, an association of 70 U.S. brokers, said this morning that the MLS policy committee’s version of the amendment was not sound policy.

“We were disappointed in how the (MLS policy) committee meeting went because instead of crafting good policy it became a rushed referendum on public sites controlled by MLSs versus not,” he said.

“That really wasn’t supposed to be the question. It was about ‘Is this a well-worded, sound policy and have we properly thought through and assigned what MLSs can charge their participants for and what they cannot, and what could be imposed on participants and what should be optional?’”

Because there was an “artificial sense” in the meeting that they had to pass something that day and not refer the policy back to the committee’s advisory group, the resulting policy was “flawed and perhaps dangerous and certainly may not reflect the intent of the members of the association and participants of the MLS,” he said.

He said the board of directors should send the policy back to committee “to get it right.”

For instance, he pointed to language in the policy that said basic services are those that are “substantially related to the purpose and functions of the MLS.”

“We don’t even agree on what the function and purposes are,” Cheatham said.

Cheatham had not immediately returned requests for comment on the Executive Committee’s decision by publication time.

A Texas homebuilder has agreed to pay more than $100,000 to resolve allegations that he received kickbacks from two mortgage lenders through joint ventures that federal regulators characterized as sham businesses.

Paul Taylor will pay $118,194 — the full amount he received since early 2010 for referring business to Benchmark Bank and Willow Bend Mortgage Co. — and will be barred from providing real estate settlement services, including mortgage originations, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau announced today.

Taylor’s company, Paul Taylor Homes, referred buyers to two joint ventures he formed with lenders, Stratford Mortgage Services and PTH Mortgage Co. But Benchmark Bank and Willow Bend actually performed the mortgage origination work — the joint ventures were formed only to pass kickbacks to Taylor through profit distributions and as a payment through a “service agreement,” the CFPB said.

The Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act (RESPA) prohibits giving and receiving kickbacks for mortgage-related services. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) separately fined Benchmark Bank for its alleged role in the RESPA violations. Source: consumerfinance.gov.

Interest rates on long-term bonds and mortgages have stopped their May rise, a little above the halfway mark of the low and high for the year. The tilt seems to be upward, but the trading pattern has been chaotic and artificial, trading on guesses at the Fed’s intentions to continue, trim or stop QE3 bond buying.

Bond markets everywhere always trade on central bank intentions to ease or tighten money in the future — nothing artificial about that — but the central banks themselves have for five years engaged in artificial, full-scale-emergency-experimental action to prevent a rerun of the 1930s, or worse.

Trading on central banks is once removed from the real drivers: inflation and economic growth. Every interest-rate analyst is always caught in this loop: What does the Fed think of incoming data, and how will it react, right or wrong?

Complicated today by this wrinkle: In normal times the Fed attempts pre-emptive action, knowing that its moves take six to 18 months to have effect. But these times are unprecedented, and no one in or out of the Fed has decent predictive tools. This is a pure, seat-of-the-pants deal, and the chairman in those pants will retire in seven months.

PIMCO has been the largest and most successful bond investment manager of the last generation. This week its CEO, Mohamed El-Erian, intoned (condensed): “The global economy will give way to one of two stark alternatives: either sustainable growth, or shortfalls, instability, social tensions, political instability and debt traps.”

Wow. El-Erian usually talks like the Oracle of Delphi, murky thought, free of specifics.

Buried in the thread: “… in the next three to five years.” Translation: The world’s central banks still can buy time and have room for more heroics. Spitball from the back: “Three to five years” means you don’t have any damned idea.

El-Erian was joined by PIMCO’s Bill Gross, modern god of bond trading, saying the Fed has “12-24 months” of QE still ahead. Fire another sloppy wad at that guy.

Meanwhile the financial press publishes in bold any investment manager with a theory, or political angler, or boondocks Fed official (Kansas City’s Ms. George, Dallas’ Mr. Fisher, and Philly’s Mr. Plosser belong in “SNL” skits) — a stream of confetti blinding civilians and professionals actually trying to figure this thing out.

Avoid analysis, and review as much hard data as you can. In a seat-of-skirt deal, yours is as good as anybody’s.

The Fed would like very much to pull back from QE, if only to reduce its political exposure. But it must err on the side of slow exit for fear of an accidental economic abort, and not enough ammunition to reverse it. To pull back, the Fed must be content that the U.S. economy has entered a self-sustaining recovery.

The job market is obviously not in such recovery. Housing may be, but did not find ignition until the Fed drove mortgage rates to 3.5 percent only 10 months ago.

Technology is a strength, and some manufacturing, but the only other general sector doing well is actually a ruinous burden on households: health care.

In a spectacular accident, void of leadership, we have achieved the largest fiscal repair of any advanced nation, the federal deficit cut in half in just two years and falling (the “out years” are not pretty, but we have time for that). The Fed is justified in easing against that fiscal drag.

Inflation is sliding by every available measure (CPI, PCE, chained-mean …), the “core” versions very close to the danger zone below 1 percent. Gold has dropped 25 percent since last fall, $1,365 today, regaining its position as one of the world’s worst investments. Falling prices are grounds for Fed easing, not tightening.

Total bank credit outstanding has just now regained the level of 2008. The U.S. GDP has grown 14 percent since then, credit support provided entirely by QE. Consumer credit is contracting 1 percent every 90 days, mostly in mortgage accounts (capping housing recovery), and shrinking despite the hideous explosion in loans to students.

There will come a time for QE pullback and higher rates, but the data say this is not that time.

You can either overregulate banks OR have enough credit.

Source: Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, via Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

Lou Barnes is a mortgage broker and nationally syndicated columnist based in Boulder, Colo. He can be reached at lbarnes@pmglending.com.