Every association of realtors has a board of directors made up of volunteers – a handful of agents who, out of the goodness in their heart, feel like giving back to the community.
Nobody is out to change the world, so you never hear much about them.
But something went haywire recently, and the largest of three associations in San Diego County is now suing the other two plus Sandicor.
From the complaint: GSDAR vs. Sandicor
“Although Plaintiff (GSDAR) owns a supermajority of Sandicor’s outstanding shares and contributes most of Sandicor’s funding, Sandicor’s board is controlled by PSAR and NSDCAR.”
“They have used this position of power to wield Sandicor as an anticompetitive weapon, milked its resources for their own enrichment, and frustrated its purpose, all while actively preventing Plaintiff from participating in corporate decisions.”
The defendants are also accused of trying to make a deal to merge Sandicor with CRMLS, the MLS company that serves 80,000+ agents throughout the rest of Southern California. The plaintiff says such a move will dramatically impact operation revenue, which sounds like it would be cheaper for agents to merge.
The GSDAR is suing for at least $1,500,000 in damages, and a jury trial.
It’s doubtful such action will do anything but pay out attorney fees, but in the end, let’s hope this causes Sandicor to disband and we can join CRMLS. It is run like a real business, has a sharp-looking consumer portal, and its MLS is more agent-friendly.
JtR,
any chance you can give those of us not in the business a primer on MLS – SANDICOR stuff? Also, why is the listing service so fractured.
Somehow I get the feeling I may bumped the hornet’s nest.
This is an example of why I always feel like San Diego has a short man’s complex – in 2016 it is insane to run your own “me too” web site. If your goal isn’t to take over the world of a particular site then don’t bother – the economies of scale are what make the cloud so pervasive and what make it so hard to compete solo. It’s wasting money and costing user experience. Zillow and Redfin would not exist in a single market – they can only succeed because of the resources an enormous user base brings you. The same is true here – everyone would be better off with a better funded site and that’s only possible with a bigger user base. Except that logic won’t fly with the provincial (not invented here) nature that I’ve always felt permeates SD.
I’m a member of the PSAR Board and just learned of the SDAR suit against SANDICOR and I guess NSDCAR. From this article I don’t believe I understand entirely what the suit is about however while on one hand I applaud SANDICOR for their support, I’ve long worried about the quality of our MLS, Paragon. Most particularly, the front facing client portal is awful. In spite of setting up client portals for my clients, many will use Zillow and other more user friendly sites to do their research. In my opinion, the #1 goal of SANDICOR should be to provide a MLS system that first and foremost presents well to our clients. Of course as agents we must have powerful, competitive tools on the back end too. But if we can’t wind the eyes and hearts of our clients, we will lose them to the likes of Zillow, Trulia, etc.
I want to get more information on this suit. Potentially I will consider switching associations to SDAR as I don’t believe that Paragon (the current MLS) is moving in the right direction. I sat in on a small group Paragon/User meeting over a year ago. We were asked for input on what features we wanted to see improved on the system. And though the Paragon system has seen some improvement over the past two years, very little requested has changed and the front end client facing interface is still awful.
Thanks Concerned Realtor and yes we lost that battle years ago and are at the mercy of better portals run by outsiders using our listings. Make the best of it, because Sandicor isn’t coming to the rescue.
My primer for Name: The governance for all associations – realtor, attorney, union, fraternity, etc. – is administered by a small group of staff people. They assist the handful of members who volunteer each year to make decisions on behalf of the associations.
Staff can be active, like at CRMLS, where they advocate for positive changes regularly. Or staff can be passive and just keep the doors open and hope they don’t get fired.
Sandicor and its owners, the three realtor associations, are run passively. I have tried repeatedly to cause changes and no one is interested.
Every year, new volunteers are elected. They shake a few hands, get quoted in the UT once or twice, and then put that on their resume the rest of their life. Nobody has done it to effect needed change, and now here we are.
This lawsuit is what happens when the ship is rudderless. The defendants are probably shocked and unaware that anyone was offended by their actions, whatever they were doing.
I was at a meeting of brokers set up by Sandicor at the Sheraton in La Jolla a few weeks ago. A Sandicor Board member was leading a meeting and they had a presentation from CRMLS. CRMLS is interested in merging with Sandicor and all of the Brokers in the room from all of the association’s were very interested in hearing more about what a merge would look like. A broker asked why we weren’t moving this forward faster and the President from SDAR and his attorney stood up and said that SDAR would not support a merge with CRMLS so don’t bother looking into it. The brokers in the room were shocked. They couldn’t give a reason for not exploring the merger. I just want to know why SDAR wouldn’t explore this to see what was available. The leaders from Sandicor and PSAR and NSDCAR seemed open minded and interested in listening to the brokers in the room. A few days later read in Inman about this suit. It makes me wonder. One huge statewide MLS might be big enough to develop better tools.