A nonprofit that launched last year to help multiple listing services, Realtor associations and brokers coordinate their efforts against data piracy, has more than doubled its membership, gaining several charter members.
REDPLAN Inc. — which stands for Real Estate Data Protection Legal Association Nonprofit — launched in July with five founding board members.
The association now has 18 charter members, most of them MLSs and Realtor associations, who pay annual membership fees ranging from $1,500 to $20,000 depending on organization type and size.
Two of REDPLAN’s newest members are My Florida Regional MLS, that state’s largest MLS at more than 33,000 subscribers, and Atlanta-based First MLS (FMLS) with more than 30,000 members.
Gregg Larson
“The industry has produced an alliance that allows our group to have a stronger voice together than a single business. Since we can all agree that the life blood of our business is the free and fair flow of data, we have a common ground from which to cooperate,” said Gregg Larson, founder and CEO of Clareity Consulting and Clareity Security, in a statement.
Larson spearheaded REDPLAN’s creation and is one of the group’s five founding board members.
Other organizations that have joined REDPLAN as charter members include:
- Greater Fort Lauderdale Realtors
- NorthstarMLS (Minnesota)
- ClearCapital.com Inc.
- Metrolist Inc. (Denver)
- Southwestern Illinois Regional MLS
- RealTracs (Nashville)
- Charleston Trident Association of Realtors (South Carolina)
- Clareity
- Kansas City Regional Association of Realtors
- Heartland MLS (Kansas City)
- Instanet Solutions
- Austin Board of Realtors
- Greater Binghamton Association of Realtors
- Texas Association of Realtors
- Tucson Association of Realtors
- Northeast Oklahoma Real Estate Services (Tulsa)
In a statement, Darity Wesley, named REDPLAN’s first full-time administrator in December, said collaborative action is powerful when it comes to intellectual property rights lawsuits. She pointed, for instance, to a class-action lawsuit recently raised and won against Facebook for using the personal pictures or profiles of users in advertisements without the users’ consent.
“Precedents are set by collective actions,” Wesley said.
REDPLAN’s board of directors will be made up of representatives of its member companies, though its composition has not yet been finalized, the association said.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to note that REDPLAN now has 18 charter members, not 17, and to add Northeast Oklahoma Real Estate Services to the list of charter members.
