Excerpts from Marke****ch -

This week, the US Dept of Justice filed suit against the National
Association of Realtors, saying the trade group's policy regarding the
online use of home sale listings from its MLS database is
anti-competitive.

Realtors think they own the data about your house. And they have
jealously guarded that "ownership," which was a lot easier to do
before the Internet age.

In this new world, real estate agents do not distinguish themselves
because they have exclusive access to listings data. They create value
by providing a wide array of services and analysis - not information
that consumers can get themselves.

It's not hard to imagine the day when there is one giant public
database of all the housing stock in the US that contains all the
information about a property that you would expect to find on a
standard listing sheet. All you would have to do if you wanted to sell
is set an alert on your file, and any for-sale searches would turn up
your house.

Who would own that data? Like any public record, we all would.

Would we still need a million realtors then? That may be the real
issue in this debate.