Actually, “drags the industry kicking and screaming” might be more accurate. Nearly three years after filing an antitrust lawsuit against the National Association of Realtors, and only weeks before the trial date, the Justice Department announced a settlement with the NAR that ends some of that organization’s restrictive practices.

Even though the NAR gets away without paying any fines or damages, the settlement is a big victory for consumers – NAR-affiliated multiple listing services can no longer allow members to withhold listings from “virtual office websites,” or VOWs – brokerages that use Internet technology to deliver real estate services at a discount. Traditional brokerages didn’t like competition from these upstarts, so instead of becoming more efficient themselves, they tried to keep the online brokerages from getting any information. In one egregious case, all of the brokers in a market withheld their listings from the single VOW in the community, which then had to shut down.

This settlement also vindicates our approach to real estate services at MLX.com. It doesn’t affect us directly – the dominant trade association here is the Real Estate Board of New York, which doesn’t belong to the NAR – but as an “upstart” brokerage that tried to use the Internet to create efficiencies, and pass those efficiencies on to the consumer, we’ve had our own run-ins with the traditional brokerages and their captive organizations and regulators. (See the previous item for news of our antitrust settlement with REBNY.)

Amazingly, the NAR still doesn’t get it. In a New York Times article, an NAR spokesperson calls the case “a five-year education of the Department of Justice” – as if they had begged to be allowed to give up their restrictive practices. Well, whoever educated the folks at Justice, we’re glad they saw the light.

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BrokersNYC, the service that we operate for independent real estate brokers in New York, won a major victory recently. We settled a long-running lawsuit against the Real Estate Board of New York and some of the biggest brokerage firms in New York.

A little history: The Real Estate Board (aka REBNY), a trade association that is controlled by the big brokerage firms, started a residential listing service a few years ago. These exclusive listings come from REBNY members, and their distribution is tightly controlled. The independent brokers who subscribe to our BrokersNYC service would have to pay through the nose to access them in any readily usable form. When we asked REBNY if we could disseminate the listings to our members through the BrokersNYC website, REBNY refused.

We filed an antitrust suit in 2004, saying it was anticompetitive to prevent services like BrokersNYC from distributing these listings to independent brokers at an affordable price. (And of course, the lack of competition doesn’t just hurt BrokersNYC and the independent brokers; it hurts consumers, too.)

Our lawsuit asked that REBNY be required to deal with any listings information service that, like BrokersNYC, operates on behalf of REBNY members, and to integrate directly with our software so that independent brokers could get a product equivalent to what the majors were getting. We also asked for at least $78 million in damages.

Last August, a judge threw out REBNY’s motion to dismiss the case. In January, we met with Magistrate Judge Dollinger and agreed to settle, and the settlement went into effect recently. While we didn’t get everything we asked for (that’s the point of a settlement), BrokersNYC is now free to compete on an equal footing with its competitors that service the brokerage community – and our clients, and ultimately the consumers, will get a better deal. We’re looking forward to rolling out new features for BrokersNYC very soon.

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