Sarasota MLS Attacks One of Their Paying Members

This is a different post for this blog. But it is needed. An Internet REALTOR friend, Marc Rasumussen, has been in a lengthy battle with his local Sarasota MLS. You see, he purchased a domain name over 5 years ago called "thesarasotamls dot com". If you do a Google search for Sarasota Real Estate you'll find Marc at the #1 position. And I think that's what caused the witch hunt.

What agents were taught - by NAR!

The National Association of REALTORS (NAR) offers training for its members, including articles (magazine and online) by Mr. Internet. Years ago, Mr. Internet published ideas for creating good real estate domain names for agent websites. He suggested using area real estate or area MLS, etc.

Marc tried getting Sarasotarealestate dot com but it was already taken. The only good domain name, according to Mr. Internet, was thesarasotamls. So he took it and spent thousands of dollars and many hours getting his website to top positions on Google and other popular search engines.

And he made other agents mad

Why else would they go after him (the Sarasota board of REALTORS) and actually file an ethics complaint against Marc (which he won)? Why, after losing this ethics complaint, would they take it as far as ICANN? ICANN, despite the ethics ruling in favor of Marc, ordered the domain name to be returned to the Sarasota MLS board. So Marc cannot use this long-standing domain any longer.

His webmaster, Morgan Carey of Real Estate Webmasters (REW) is trying to use a 301 redirect to his new domain, http://www.luxurysarasotarealestate.com/, so Marc can retain some of the authority he built over the years. This will help him while he's trying to build this brand new domain, which will take some time.

But we don't yet know if he'll be able to continue doing this. Once the redirect is removed I'm sure we'll see Marc's long-standing positions decline. All of those thousands of dollars and hours of work down the drain, plus having to start over from scratch in the highly competitive real estate community on the Internet.

Other's envy is hurting a family

Anyone else who has a website that falls below Marc's in the search engines could spend money and put in the same amount of hours to try to beat Marc or at least show up right below him, which will still give them business. Instead, a group formed to complain about Marc's site and finally got their way. What will they do to the next webmaster who outranks them? And I hope they'll chase the other websites with MLS in the domain name, no matter how low they appear in the search engines. But I doubt they'll bother with those.