Timothy Birdnow

I disagree.

The author, a former Trump Administration member who served on the FTA and in the DOJ, argues for greater scrutiny and federal regulations of multiple listing services (MLS) companies in an effort to fix something that has never been broken.

Yes, the MLS companies have wide leeway in choosing to post or not post listings, but as they make their money by posting there is a strong financial incentive to do so.

And it is already illegal to coordinate prices of housing. Or fees Realtors can charge, for that matter.

The big beef here is a listing service that takes non-Realtor listings. In particular there is a case where the Realtor companies and the MLS company are subsidiaries.

But so what? The internet exists and there is no way an mls company can possible hide a property from the public. We live in a golden age for the sale of real property, where anybody can list and sell their property with no difficulties, no advertising, no sweat.

This is a solution in search of a problem.

I would further add this is a future problem in that it is being used to address a minor issue now but will be used to force an ideological viewpoint on America in the future. If the Federal Government takes control of the real estate business they will start using this new-found authority to, say, promote things like what Joe Biden and Barack Obama before him promoted - to integrate wealthy, largely white communities with groups of minorities/aliens/Democrats to gerrymander Republican districts. They will use this sort of power being displayed here for "affordable housing" and how can we fight that? It will be the Trump Administration that put it in place and our Republican Congress.

Real estate is local and has long been primarily under local or state regulation, not much in the way of federal outside of the Fair Housing Act and other anti-discriminatory laws. (They used to send testers to us all the time to evaluate their treatment; I learned to spot them eventually but they were often harder to find then you would think and I imagine I missed a lot of them.) But as long as you obeyed the racial and other laws (like handicapped) you would avoid any federal entanglements. This is going to change that.

There have long been laws regulating dual agency, one of the problems this author is concerned about. Dual agency is sticky and can often be solved by farming the business out to a third party. Some states allow dual agency (where you represent both sides of a real estate deal, but it must be disclosed and the agent acts as a transactional broker and nothing more) and some do not. Nobody wants to be in that position; it is fraught with legal peril.

At any rate I think this is a solution in search of a problem. The exploding price of real estate has nothing to do with trusts or monopolies or price gauging but everything to do with illegal aliens - too many people in search of housing - and with the inflation of our currency, and with too high property and other taxes which drive up the cost of ownership (hence people can't afford it) and a number of other things that go along with it. Interest rates are too high at this point. There are other issues, but MLS/broker collusion is not one of them.

Congress needs to stop wasting time on non-problems and actually deal with important issues of the day (like passing the SAVE America act). This is just a distraction.

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