A few days ago, Craig Cheatham, President and CEO of The Realty Alliance, posted on LinkedIn a few paragraphs that he had presented to California Association of REALTORS MLS Workgroup. It has not gotten the kind of exposure and discussion that it deserves.
TRA has outsized influence because it is a network of some of the largest independent brokerages in the country, and it has been the driving force for some of the bigger initiatives of the past. We can't forget that it was Cheatham himself who made the famous "You have ten days" declaration back in 2013. So when he posts something like this, it's worth thinking about.
What I'd like to do in this post is to go through Cheatham's points, then make some suggestions towards addressing them. I think much of my thinking and writing the past few years all tend to point towards the same conclusion, which I will argue for: "We need a new understanding of what it means to be an MLS Participant."
Turns out that quite a few of our most contentious issues have this problem at their hearts. Perhaps solving for the Participant problem, which has been tried before, could solve the controversial symptoms that result from it.
Let's get into it.
