Want Sold Data? Soon, baby, soon!
Sold Data: If you’re friends with a REALTOR you may or may not have heard that the Competition Bureau recently ruled against the Toronto Real Estate Board in a precedent setting ruling that could result in innovative brokerages like us being able to release sold information on our search tool.
The Bureau filed an application with the Tribunal seeking to prohibit TREB’s rules that restrict how its member agents provide information to consumers, such as previous listings and previous sale prices, thereby denying agents the ability to introduce new and innovative real estate brokerage services using the Internet.
We’ve been quoted dozens of times in the media over the past couple of years as proponents of open data. You can read our quotes in the Business Section of the National Post, the CBC Business Section, The Huffington Post, The Toronto Star Business Section and Mortgage Broker News just to name a few. We’ve also appeared live on CBC Radio, Global News and various other live media.
Our position is very clear as are the voices of many other paying Toronto Real Estate Board members but the voices of the old school “the-way-it’s-always-been-done” brokers are pretty loud and TREB had no choice but to spend millions of dollars defending this data. The Sold Data that the competition bureau wants to have released to the public but TREB wants to keep behind our big wall is what we’re talking about here.
TREB is arguing that this is a major privacy concern and people don’t want how much they paid for a property to be out there so easily accessible to folks. What some people may not know is that you can currently get this information from the Land Registry at City Hall. If you’re not an agent you’re likely not exposed to the daily banter that goes on while we’re all our there “real estating” but what we’re hearing mostly is that “If we give out this info, consumers won’t need us anymore!!” we call BS on that argument. Unfortunately, there are more REALTOR’s that are paying members of TREB with this POV than not so TREB has a mandate to protect its members.
Perhaps it’s true, there are many of the 40,000+ sales reps and brokers our there that have nothing else to offer other than standing between this info (you can likely spot them out there using their blakcberry to take listing photos while we hire professional photographers and videographers). We’re quite happy to have the herd thinned. Maybe we’re wrong and we’re the ones that will be thinned (I highly doubt that though). We were one of the first brokerages in Toronto offer a VOW on our site which was able to provide more information than the MLS like how long a property has been on the market, the property tax info, and if there had been a price change.
Sold data won’t lead to the “Uberization” of Real Estate as some publications have stated. We’re not even there yet. Releasing sold data will help Real Estate catch up to the Googleization of Real Estate which happened to the rest of the world a decade ago.
