There has been a growing swell of interest in investigating the real estate industry and their current commission structure. The General Accounting Office recently published its findings in its report Real Estate Brokerage: Factors that May Affect Price Competition.

And on 25 October 2005, the DOJ and FTC will host a Workshop on Competition Policy and the Real Estate Industry.

It will be interesting to see what comes of these Federal initiatives.

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Yesterday afternoon, my father and I attended a Memorial Service for our neighbor, Robert A. Little, an architect known for his modern 1950s style that focused on people and who passed away at age 89. On our private cul-de-sac road with “common ground,” I remember Bob Little for his community spirit and enthusiasm of hosting neighorhood Christmas parties and judging vegetable sculpture contests at Labor Day picnics.

I learned more about Bob when his long time partner, Bob A. Madison shared his memories of Bob.  In the 1940s when segregation was still commonplace in many states, Bob Madison, an Afro American, graduated from architecture school and was turned down for many jobs.  Bob Little hired Madison — along with shunned Jewish architects because, as Madison put it, “It was the right thing to do.”

My family, of Chinese descent, was the first non-white family to be welcomed by the small coterie of neighbors on this private street.  Life was simpler in our suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, where neighbors practiced what was right.

I guess NYDOS officials didn’t grow up with the same influences teaching them the right thing to do.

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By Jessica Swesey, Inman News
The U.S. Justice Department today filed an antitrust lawsuit against the National Association of Realtors challenging its new policy for online property listings display.

The Justice Department’s Antitrust Division has been investigating the Realtor trade group’s policies for Internet listings over whether it has been restricting competition among real estate brokers.
read more…

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Finally, the Justice Department has sued the National Association of Realtors (NAR) for its anticompetitive behavior as relates to NAR’s policies for the online display of real estate listings.  <a href=”http://money.cnn.com/2005/09/08/real_estate/doj.reut/index.htm”>DOJ wants real estate market fairness</a>

The Justice Department observed that NAR’s rule “prevents consumers from receiving the full benefits of competition and threatens to lock in outmoded business models and discourage discounting.”

Well, yeah.  We launched MLX, a licensed real estate brokerage, in 1993 as an Open Real Estate Market where consumers had access to the same listings that brokers did.  Real estate special interest groups prevailed upon then Secretary of State Sandy Treadwell to reverse his position 180 degrees from supporting online services which gave consumers more access at lower costs to supporting an antiquated Apartment Information Vendor (AIV) law which made any real-time on-demand online real estate business impossible.

Catch the flavor of our case, <a href=”http://asklala.com/index.cfm?action=Cases&subaction=Cases&caseID=1″> New York Department of State v. Principal Connections Limited</a>, which resulted in the suspension of my real estate broker’s license for operating an “unlicensed” AIV.  (It’s okay to provide the same services to brokers, just not consumers.)

Then laugh yourself silly when you read NYDOS’s June 2005 <a href-<http://www.asklala.com/pdf/AIVProposedRuleMAking050615.pdf”>Proposed Rule Making</a> which declared the AIV law “obsolete” and how NYDOS has spent two years <a ref=”http://asklala.com/index.cfm?action=Cases&subaction=Cases&caseID=9″>denying and seeking to overturn</a> a judge’s granting of the AIV license to me.

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