NEW MRIS Fees - $24,000.00 a year for MLS Data?

Something tells me that this should not just be a concern for MRIS members, but any member who is part of an MLS and provides a user friendly IDX solution for their visitors. I think it's pretty safe to say that MLS "consultants" are a pretty small group and it will not take long for others to follow suit. Resulting in less choices and paying too much for junk that will never update with the times because there will be no competition. If I was an MRIS member, I'd certainly want to know where all of that money is going. Quote - "AND my great websites have to iframe in your ugly IDX solution." -- end Quote". That's Funny! It's a good thing that they can't control the website part otherwise we'd all be using R.com web sites!

Morgan; The pricing for that seems ridiculous! $350 per year for a FRAMED solution? Whoa...sounds like they are taxing everyone pretty heavy all the way around. In the end, all of these fees come out of REALTOR's individual pockets...They need to think about gouging the REALTOR less and more about providing means for the REALTOR to get better info in a less costly way to the consumer...that's what they are in business to do, correct? Best Eric

Morgan, Sounds like a monopoly in action. No concern for their customer, No concern for anyone else, only concerned with how much they can gouge out of each REALTOR and each vendor for a IDX feed from there MLS database. MRIS Management should be ashamed of themselves as this is totally crazy. I just hope that my MLS does not get wind of this, they likely would try the same thing. Perhaps we should send this information to the DOJ (Department of Justice) so they can bring a case against MRIS for monopolistic activities. Jim

Holy moly, this is outrageous. I couldn't be more depressed about this news and what it will do to me, MRIS's client. It's not Morgan's company or other Vendors who are punished, it's MRIS subscribers like myself who ALREADY pay a substantial membership fee. I stopped using their Active Agent solution. I then invested a LOT of money to put together our website that uses data (that I already pay for) from mris. All this money and months and hundreds of labor hours may all go for nothing? Morgan, I will definitely contact MRIS directly and link to this post. Anyone reading this, your help by linking to this post and emailing MRIS is greatly appreciated! MRIS contact info: email helpdesk@MRIS.net Sample of site who frames in this Active Agent solution: http://www.chericeclark.com/

BJ - I will need to confirm with Reed - but I think this fee only applies if we do any "more" MRIS - IDX, there "may" be some sort grandfather clause in place that would mean we do not have to cancel our current subscriptions if we choose not to pay the $24,000

Reed here. Morgan is correct. The fees will only affect new clients as this is a change in policy and all our clients with access before the change have licensing agreements in place already. I don't think they would hesitate to charge us retroactively if they could.

"Their justification for this was increasing costs..." Maybe I need to get into the MLS business! :rolleyes:

So sounds like you are A-OK for now BJ - sorry for likely almost giving you a heart attack

From the MRIS About Us page: "So, MRIS is the name of an MLS? Yes, in fact, MRIS is the largest MLS in the nation. MRIS is owned by 25 Shareholder REALTOR® Associations spanning most of Maryland, all of DC, Northern Virginia, and parts of West Virginia and Pennsylvania, 22,000 square miles in all." Maybe these association muckity mucks serve on Capital Hill in their spare time. Probably the same guys that dreamed up the tax code! Looking at the benefit we get out of REALTOR® dot com what would you expect.

Indeed, who has a financial interest in limiting the number of custom IDX vendors. Who also has an interest in controlling how that data is displayed

Bummer I just convinced my parter in Northern Virginia to use your IDX MLS service. If things change, let us know. His deliberation was mostly due to the slow market. He had planned on doing it March 2008. $24K is pretty hefty though. Ouch.

Tampa4u, can you share your partner's current website with us... i'm just curious (nosy)

yup... it's in2va.com

I was just doing some research on another forum regarding redesigning my website and the folks on the forum convinced me that a custom IDX was the only way to go. This is a bummer. Typical of MRIS, however, limiting the playing field to the sub average......

Steveb - those members are right - if you do have it in your budget to do a true custom IDX, there are a lot of benefits. I do not believe that anyone on their preferred vendor list program actually offers a true custom IDX solution, they are all canned type solutions like the MRIS solution with limited if any customizability, and are not search engine friendly. Ah well - at least it's a level playing field.

Hi, Morgan. First, thanks for sharing your thoughts on this issue. I work for MRIS, but I wasn't part of any of your previous discussions with MRIS. However, I can say this: MRIS has made a commitment to our customers to safeguard their listing content on the Internet. That takes a lot of time – and money. Our VP business development for MRIS wishes he had 7-digit revenue from RETS license fees ;-). Remember, due to our size, there are hundreds of authorized vendors creating thousands of web sites, all of which must be monitored for compliance – not just once, but on an ongoing basis -- since everyone wants something new from time to time. The costs associated with maintaining and monitoring this content have increased exponentially. We have carefully considered the interests of all involved and believe this change to our program is reasonable.

i typed "mris mls" in google and this post is showing on the first page. nice work

Mike from MRIS thank you for your comments, and welcome to REW Blogs. I certainly can appreciate the cost of running a team of developers and supporting IDX data - Currently we support over 90 MLS boards with over 30 developers, so please don't take my blog the wrong way. I DO understand that there are costs associated with creating and maintaining the infrastructure required to support your network. I am also more than willing (As are my clients) to pay for resources required and used to provide our service - that is also not my complaint. But I must admit I am bit confused - you say you have "hundreds of vendors" - on your FAQ page, Item 11 http://www.mris.com/products/rets/faqs.cfm you reference only 16 and that is "pre-fee increase" so my assumption is that some of these vendors may yet opt out. Where does this "hundreds of vendors" come from, and are they all being asked to pony up $24,000 per year? It seems kind of arbitrary to me - I mean we have 8 or so (Not sure on the final number) and have never been required to pay anything, now we are being told, if we do a ninth the cost of servicing your members is $24,000 a year. That is just not a viable or scalable solution. I mean we are not like Advanced Access, or Homes.com (Both owned by dominion) where we mass produced canned solutions that are low cost and inflexible - we are a very exclusive high end development house, and are our custom deployments are cost prohibitive to the majority of Realtors - But this is development cost only, and a 10k site costs that much because it is over 100 hours of development time - we need to pay those developers, overhead, etc etc, we have no high residual fee with which to cover your costs and are already only profiting a small margin per project - It would be impossible for us to pay this fee - and I highly doubt our MRIS customers would be willing to split $24,000 9 ways - they would think that was highway robery (And forgive me for saying so, but they would be right in doing so) Is there no middle ground here? I mean we absorb all of the overhead in terms of storage and bandwidth (We do not query your servers directly) and we handle all of the support - not a problem there, and we are still willing to pay a "fair" fee for data access - You say you considered the interests of all involved, and I have to beg to differ - you have not considered the interests of our customers (Your members) - you have not considered Real Estate Webmasters (The potential vendor) and I am not sure how well you have considered the ability to cover your own costs with such a model. It is easier to sell 100,000 of something at $100 than it is to sell 1 of something at $1,000,000 - Perhaps there is information I do not have, or have made assumptions (Such as the fact that there are currently only 16 vendors paying this fee) incorrectly. So please correct me if I am wrong - are your "hundreds of vendors" being required to pay this fee, or is it just those 16? If it IS just those 16, then is 8 the magical number of clients you can hit before having to convert wholesale from free to high costs data access model?

This is pretty ridiculous. MRIS is outlandish in their fees to begin with. Morgan- have you thought about doing some kind of sign up for potential MRIS clients that need your services? Maybe after you have 15 sites lined up, you can purchase the license and spread the cost 24 ways for $1,000 each? Then if you sign any more clients up throughout the year through MRIS, charge them the $1,000... and however many clients you sign up over the 24 initial recruits within that year, you divide that money up evenly at the end of the year amongst all of your MRIS clients. This way they pay $1,000 but will probably get a few hundred back at the end of the year. Once you have the initial 24/ then the fee will just get lower and lower per year... just a suggestion. But you are right in your position, the 24k fee is creating a monopoly and a HUGE entry barrier for developers who dont do 100 sites/year.

I have thought about several scenarios - and will certainly still need to pursue them due to the fact that we have so many members now asking us for MRIS IDX due to this post and possibly due to rate hikes they are seeing from their vendors as fallout from this.

Are the agents not providing the data in the first place? Isn't that who buys IDX solutions from the vendors? It seems outrageous for the REALTOR members (who are by the way members of the board) have to pay such a premium so that the IDX vendor can access the data that is provided to other vendors for a lesser amount. The fact that one of the vendors has the expertise to slice and dice the data in a meaningful way for the agents client should not matter nor dictate a premium for that data feed. If I were a paying member of that board I would want to review the annual report of the entity (of course including any foot notes disclosing relationships that may not be arms length - they do that in real estate you know - and also in cooperatives and public companies - in fact I can only imagine not having to do so in a sole proprietorship or a very closely held entity). Is there an implication that it is OK if you are selling homes to a family with 5 children the home is X price, but if they have 6 children then the price goes up by 1000%. What is the difference? By the way does NAR have an annual report for it's members? I would love to see the revenue stream from the REALTOR dot com setup and disclosure of all of the providers and relationships.

Morgan, please keep me posted on what you all decide to do regarding this issue. Thanks for bringing this up and keeping it in the front row...

We were planning on having REW integrate our new IDX solution but this has completely put our project on hold... Very disappointing but it is simple economics for REW and we understand. Since this has happened, we have spoken to some of the "100's of vendors" here in Northern VA about custom IDX solutions and most of them do not do any kind of custom IDX. They keep asking us why we want such a customized solution and frankly if they don't get it we are not going to explain it to them. I would also like to add that every company that we have spoken with had no idea about this new fee.

Thanks for the update, Morgan. As one of the few MRIS members with an existing REW custom IDX website (I've had it for almost 1 year now), I can attest to the value in having a custom IDX--both for users and for search engine results. I looked around for a long time before selecting REW to build my site and could not be happier with the decision. I also know from the experience of building the custom IDX on my site that MRIS can be very difficult to work with and often arbitrary with their policies and enforcement. The hoops they required me and REW to jump through for my site were time-consuming, aggravating, and most had little relationship to the ostensible reasons given for MRIS regulations. I got the impression at the time that MRIS wasn't thrilled to be giving agents the data directly. Anyone less persistent or unsure of the value of a custom IDX could have easily come the conclusion that it simply wasn't worth the hassle. Now for MRIS to add to that struggle an astronomical fee is even more ridiculous, especially given that REW is so conscientious about protecting the manner and quality in which the data used--far more so than most of the mass production IDX providers. This certainly seems to be a way to lock members into using the MRIS ActiveAgent product. Please keep us posted, especially as it relates to MRIS members with existing IDX sites from REW.

Morgan, perhaps you should start a side business as a vendor monitoring compliance across IDX users. Frankly, it sounds profitable as hell given the picture you are painting with this group.

I came across this forum when I Googled "MRIS MLS". I was actually looking for a customized IDX site for my business but have been looking with no avail. The first thing I thought when reading this post was WOW! I cannot believe that the MRIS would do such a greedy thing! I have been looking for a custom solution for a real estate site with no luck. I've looked at the "partner" affiliates that are listed on the MRIS and nothing is of interest to me. They are all the same, boring redundant sites that have a template to pretty much only change colors, etc. The MRIS is trying to monopolize the real estate web design market for their Active Agent product which is completely unfair. Maybe I'll boycott the MRIS and use my buddy's login to save $660/Yr. Isn't that enough money MRIS? or do you have to corner the market and squeeze more out of each Realtor by forcing us to use your IDX product? So all of the sudden they changed the price for web designers from $0 to $24,000/year? Whats the justification? Well, I refuse to purchase an Active Agent website or any of these cookie-cutter IDX sites that everyone seems to be selling. Good luck Morgan, I hope the MRIS comes to their senses and finally realizes how messed up this fee is. Let me know if there are any updates or if you end up getting the data license.

In MRIS's defense (not that they have much), members are still permitted to have a direct data feed. They are still allowed to apply for access, designate a web consultant, put together a mock-up for MRIS's compliance approval, and receive a data feed. But that web consultant must either be a Master Licensee (i.e. paying $24K) or not be serving anyone else. This means you are either putting all of your IDX eggs in to the basket of a company who sees the $24K fee as too costly to customize access for each of their clients (instead making template solutions) or a company who has little to no experience dealing with the complicated nature of IDX technology. REW has built up quite a community of satisfied customers catering to the needs of the real estate professional who wants to separate themselves from the pack. They want a high-end, customized web presence that they often can't find elsewhere. For MRIS to make such a drastic change to their IDX policy is a disservice to its members, and they should know this.

For those of you who are MRIS subscribers watching this blog, MRIS has provided us with alternative pricing - we are now entertaining orders for REW custom IDX for MRIS http://www.realestatewebmasters.com/blogs/morgan-carey/4713/show/