Looks like Andrea Brambila of Inman News is back at it again with one of her favorite subjects, NAR wasting their members money.
In a post entitled “What Does Upstream Have To Show For Itself?” she surgically disects the “dream” of the Upstream initiative. Frankly there are so many juicy quotes its hard to list them. Here’s a few tidbits that caught my attention.
“In May 2015, NAR’s board of directors, made up of about 800 members, approved $12 million for NAR subsidiary Realtors Property Resource (RPR) to build Upstream and a related, but separate project called Advanced Multilist Platform (AMP). Upstream is set to exhaust its $6 million share of the funds — which don’t have to be repaid — by the end of 2017.”
I’d forgotten is was that much money.
“According to the CEOs of the two MLSs that will deploy Upstream’s original plan — RMLS and MLSListings — RPR did not publish data mapping tables they needed in order to integrate with Upstream until a month ago, on September 25, 2017.”
Remember when Dale Stinton and Alex blamed MLS vendors for delays. Good times…good times.
“You can’t say people aren’t cooperative when they don’t have enough information to be cooperative or not,” Harrison said.
John Mosey, president and CEO of pilot market NorthstarMLS, agreed.
“The problems are entirely between Upstream and RPR. I don’t think they are between the vendor community. The MLSs that have signed up for the pilots, every one of us have done everything possible to make this work,” he said.
…
“No one knows what the hell Upstream’s doing and there’s questions as to whether they do,” Mosey added, saying that, as far as he could tell, the broker direct feed was a return to status quo.
I love John Mosey.
“Toward the end of Inman’s interview with Mosey, he declared he wished he hadn’t taken the call.
“Because when you announce that [nothing’s happened] — which is absolutely true — there will be a segment of the broker community that uses this as an excuse to say the MLSs are uncooperative and it’s a lie. It’s a lie from the get-go.”
Did I say how much I love John yet?
All in all I think HAR president Cindy Hamann said it best.
“People are getting paid for this,” said Hamann, a real estate broker with Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Anderson Properties and 23-year Realtor. “That makes me mad. That makes me angry. This is members’ money. I’m a hardworking member who is very proud that I was able to send my kids to college without college debt because of real estate. And they haven’t started yet? That makes me angry because that means [Upstream’s] going to come back asking for more money.”
And something tells me that Andrea/Inman isn’t done posting this week.
I’m not sure it’s Craig that should be in that picture with his quote. I can think of others far more deserving.