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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