Your Real Estate Website is Illegal

It is November, that time of year when you need to schedule the update on your copyright to © 2013 before January 1. But there is more that you should be considering--a revision to the way that you handle the terms of use.

Most real estate websites place their terms of use conspicuously deep down in the footer of their website, along with their privacy policy. This is the way that it has been done for years. However, a court case involving Amazon.com subsidiary Zappos just changed all of that.

In the Zappos case, 24 million consumer email addresses where stolen by hackers. Zappos went to arbitration and settled the case. The judge in the case threw out the arbitrated settlement for two reasons.

• The Zappos terms of use indicate that they can change the agreement at any time. The judge ruled that this is inherently unfair, and previous courts have invalidated contracts on those grounds before.
• The consumer did not explicitly agree to the Privacy Policy or Terms of Use.

Go look at your website, and register. Is there a clickwrap? How about if the consumer fills out a form?

In truth, you should speak to your lawyer about what is best in your state to comply with state and federal laws. I know that Larson Sobotka LLC and Privacy Solutions both have deep experience in these areas of law and they get real estate.

If you contact the firm, start with Brian Larson at Larson Sobotka, or Darity Wesley at Privacy Solutions. They may pass you along to one of their associates in the firm, but do not worry about that. They have done this sort of work before and are saving you money by having a lower paid lawyer get you fixed up.

It should look like this (privacy audit performed by Privacy Solutions):

To view the original article, visit the WAV Group blog.