Gone are the days when REALTORS® would do the legwork and provide a stack of listings to buyers. Would-be buyers can view listing data any number of places online, though they tend to go in droves to the big online real estate portals (think realtor.com®, Homes.com, Trulia, Zillow). Yet, issues surrounding who owns the listing data, and how it is being disseminated across the Web—at worst, illegally and, at best, contrary to the intentions of its owners—continue to raise the ire of real estate brokers and online listings organizations.

"Giving your data to a third party, who then wants you to pay them for business generated by that listing—either directly or indirectly—is analogous to lending someone your watch and then paying them later to tell you what time it is." –Alex Perriello, president and CEO of Realogy Franchise Group

A growing number are asking how they can protect their data, their brands and their business from a rising tide of data misappropriation. What follows are some important considerations for protecting those hard-won assets—your listings.

Understanding the Issues

There are three areas are of primary concern: 1) data scraping; 2) data leakage; and 3) advertising practices of real estate portals. MLSs and brokers with effective websites tend to be most concerned about data scraping, which is the illicit copying or indexing of data by computer programs from a website. The second type of widespread misuse is data leakage, in which once-licensed data is repurposed or passed on for unauthorized uses.