Another nail in our coffin. Try to find sales with alternative private listing networks.

[Tom D]

Now we might have to find sales thru new private listing networks, if they are available. This is starting to kill my good appraising attitude. Will we get paid more for this work.

From Business Insider, a long article

Realtors are fighting over hidden listings. Their battle could make it harder to find a home.​

Real estate's power players are engaged in a bitter standoff over who exactly gets to see the millions of homes listed for sale in the US each year. At the center of the debate are the multiple-listing services, or MLSes, local databases that gather pictures and details of homes for sale. Almost as soon as a real-estate agent starts touting a home publicly — via an email blast, a post on their website, or a sign in a front yard — they'll throw the listing on the MLS to be fed to other agents and aggregator sites like Zillow. Smart business move? Sure. But agents also don't have a choice, thanks to a rule handed down five years ago by the powerful National Association of Realtors called the "clear-cooperation policy," which requires them to list a home on the MLS within one business day of marketing it to the public.

The result would be a more fractured market; instead of going to just Zillow or Realtor.com, a buyer might have to comb through individual brokerages' websites. Agents might be emboldened to share listings among private networks of in-the-know brokers rather than market them to everyone. More homes could trade hands out of view of the average homebuyer. Opponents of the rule say sellers should be able to market their homes however they see fit, arguing that there are all kinds of reasons someone might not want to list their home on the MLS. The whole point of the MLS, though, is to have all listings in one place for everyone to find — the system falls apart if agents get to pick and choose which ones to contribute. Teasing homes in a private listing network without also posting on the MLS was a no-go.

Both sides of this debate can reasonably claim that the industry will face legal trouble if they don't get their way. The Department of Justice, which has been fighting to reopen a wide-ranging investigation into the NAR, has signaled that the organization's control of the MLSes could be anticompetitive, stifling the development of alternative databases.

 

[J Grant]

I wouldn't call it a nail in the coffin, but it makes the work even harder and takes longer.