I am interested in speaking with anyone that has successfully created and passed regulator review of a marketing service agreement with a realtor.

If you find someone, I'd love to talk to them too!

My guess is that we will both be waiting for awhile!

I have some experience with these, what are you after?

I am interested in recent exam experiences in this area.

Well obviously there is the usual exam caveat that you don't really know what is going to jump on the radar of the EIC to know what they will be looking for but a few things:

1. Support the valuation of the services on a per service basis. If you have a pile of random services in an agreement and are just ball parking the amount you are paying that will likely be criticized.

2. Monitor the individual services. Establish some process for making sure you get what you are paying for. If your valuation says you are getting signs at 5 offices, make sure those signs are there and can actually be seen. Also, if you have services that are going to vary based on market conditions, account for that somehow.

3. Watch out for squishy services. Services that involve "meetings" or "discussions" with the realtor need to have something behind them.

4. Know what the services actually entail. Similar to #3, if your agreement calls for "meetings," find out what those meetings really are by asking the LOs. You don't want the first time you find out that either these meetings don't happen or they involve talking about client referrals to be when the examiners are interviewing your LOs.

5. Don't pay for referrals. Seems easy enough but if you pay a realtor for direct marketing you are paying for referrals based on HUD's rules. Likewise, if you are buying "leads" from a realtor there is probably "affirmative influence" and then you are paying for referrals. Don't build these things into your agreements.

6. Know the interplay between your agreement and other regulations. Are you getting phone numbers or emails provided via the agreement either formally or informally? How are you complying with CANSPAM and TCPA when your LOs are contacting the consumers?

This is what I have seen focused on and the results.....have generally not been very good. The MSA can be tough to get through examiner review. If you have a specific question, feel free to ask or PM.

I am interested in social media promotion myself and how you value that level of advertising? Trying to figure out the avenue of providing them with product/process educational and information content that they can post on their social media platforms, when the cost of production is near nothing (as we can produce in house with today's technology for pennies).

We're fortunate to have a handful of realtors that really enjoy working with us and wish to give us an avenue of promotion and exposure, not that they receive any fee for that, but they feel their value comes from the smoothness of the transaction. But obviously, we need to find a way to compensate for that exposure to their client base. Some of the hard items like signage and direct mailers are much easier to split and document, but the soft advertising is giving my more pause.

Overall, I see this is a very simple MSA, but still with regulatory pitfalls.

You say obviously you need to compensate them for the exposure, but do you? If they are willing to do it for free then it shouldn't create a problem because they would refer to you and give you the thing of value, no exchange as everything is going one way.

If you are saying obviously you need to compensate because they are saying they won't do it otherwise, you can quantify the distribution by looking at the influencer market or more generally just looking at how much Facebook would charge to distribute your ads for you. That could give you a comparable market to justify the reasonableness of the payment. I would anticipate this being a relatively low amount when you look at how much exposure you truly get but should give you pretty strong support as to the market value. Also realize that social media marketing could still be direct marketing if there is 1 to 1 communication of your ads.

The new RESPA Section 8 FAQs released by the CFPB yesterday might also be worth a read.

https://www.consumerfinance.gov/pol...l-estate-settlement-procedures-act-faqs/