MLS.ca, CREA and anti-competition

The current witch-hunt against the Canadian Real Estate Association (CREA) concerning its MLS.ca service is the height of irresponsibility and Melanie Aitken, the commissioner at the Competition Bureau, is at the fore-front of this absurd attack:

“The Canadian Real Estate Association, through its members, has substantial control or complete control over the supply of residential real estate brokerage services throughout Canada,” the Bureau said in its filing to the Competition Tribunal. “CREA and its members have used CREA’s control of MLS and related trademarks to impose exclusionary restrictions on their use.”

Well, duh. The Canadian Real Estate Association should be free to operate their website listings however they choose. It makes sense to restrict the listings to their own members. You have to pay to play.

What is next? Will the Competition Bureau go after the Water Buffalo Club for excluding non-members from participating in their weekly karaoke night?

The MLS.ca listing service is a fraction of what the Canadian Real Estate Association offers to its members and to the public. Membership also incorporates a recognition of certain standards of business practice. Up until this point, a real estate customer who finds a listing on the MLS.ca has certain expectations and possibly recourse if those expectations are not met. Any clarity of such standardization will soon be crushed by the Competition Bureau.

This is a fine example of the innate challenge with civil service and socialism. Since the job of a civil servant is rarely — if ever at all — threatened by market forces, the civil servant can be forever fixated on optimizing the most pleasant color of the website without ever realizing that the performance of the back-end matters substantially more.

Membership in CREA is somewhere in between the aesthetics of the MLS.ca site and the performance of its search engine.
Should a day’s labor or a week’s labor or maybe a month be spent choosing the best color of the website?
Should a month’s labor or a week’s labor or only one day be spent optimizing the search engine?
Without the risk of loss, the civil servant can not make such responsible decisions. Balancing all of the features of the business model should be decided by the business owner. If the balance is a failure, it is the business owner who pays not the civil servant.

To the civil servant, devoting exorbitant resources to study and develop esoteric details is fun — sometimes the very goal — but can ultimately be a waste to the customer. In this way, the damage created by the civil servant can continue unchecked at the expense of the intended beneficiaries.

The competition bureau fabricates their own “work” and when they run out of things to do, they have the state-blessed power to invent more. In so doing, they trample the freedoms of innovators and economic progressives. After the competition bureau crushes the MLS.ca listings, there will be less of an incentive for real estate agents to aspire to the high standards of the Canadian Real Estate Association and the customer will ultimately have a more difficult time separating the wheat from the chaff.

Regardless, let us not get bogged down in economic incentives and intelligent market analysis. As far as I am concerned, the Canadian Real Estate is a business and I presume they need to make money to survive. The restrictive policy of the MLS.ca is an honest way to make their money.