Notorious R.O.B.

See that green pattern on the bark! That's 3.2(b)(iii) of the License!

Once again, I find myself in the curious position of praising the good folks at RPR while at the same time ending up on a negative note.  On the one hand, RPR’s posting their Content License Agreement (complete with redlined corrections) is by far the most transparent thing that I’ve seen a company do in real estate industry thus far.  Kudos not just to Reggie Nicolay, the Social Media director of RPR, but also to Marty Frame and to Dale Ross, the executives in charge of RPR.  These guys talk the talk, and walk the walk of being open and transparent.  Thank you guys, and I really mean that.

If you’d like to look at the entire Agreement, including the Terms of Use for the RPR Website, go to the Google Doc here.

Some of the critiques already on the web may be entirely valid, but I think they largely miss the point.  For example, Mike Wurzer’s post suggesting that the new License Agreement allows RPR to sell listing-level data to various customers may be accurate (or may not be, as Marty Frame points out in the comments), but… this falls into the category of missing the forest because you’re too busy looking at whether the tree is a douglas fir or a pine tree.

There are three major, fundamental issues that the License Agreement does not address — primarily because those issues stem from RPR’s business model and its basic value proposition.  If the goal is to nitpick the language of the Agreement in the hopes of finding a provision on which one can base a future lawsuit, I suppose the detailed analysis being done now is interesting.  If the goal, however, is to understand the fundamental challenge of RPR, then we need to raise our eyes up a bit.

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