Review NAR guidelines before creating new email account

On July 31, Microsoft opened up its brand new online email service – Outlook.com – as a replacement for its Hotmail product. Users will still be able to use their old Hotmail addresses, but their usernames won’t carry over to the new ‘Outlook.com’ domain.

For example, a user who is <[email protected]> won’t automatically be entitled to <[email protected]>. The only way to get the Outlook.com username you want is to sign up for the account on the new site – which is what more than 1 million people did over the first six hours of availability.

Should you sign up for one of these new accounts? I don’t know – not my department.  I’m a law and policy guy, not a tech guy, so this is neither a review of the new service nor a commentary on whether an Outlook.com email address is a good thing for your business.

But as you’re considering whether to grab one of these new email accounts, I plead with you yet again to remember that there are very specific NAR rules about how you can and can’t use the Realtor® marks in your business. In fact, the NAR Membership Marks Manual has a section with guidelines on how the word “Realtor®” can and can’t be used online, and NAR also publishes resources for using the term in social media.

The most obvious rule that applies in this situation is the limitation on using descriptive words with the term “Realtor®.” You can do pretty much anything you want to combine your own name or your firm name with “Realtor®” in a domain or email address, but you can’t use other descriptive or geographical terms. For example:

Acceptable

• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]

Unacceptable

• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]

Do members have email addresses and domain names that violate these rules? Yes, they do. In most cases, I like to think that it’s just a simple lack of knowledge about the rules, though there are occasionally folks who know the rules and just deliberately ignore them.

NAR, PAR and your local association try to educate members on the rules with things like newsletter updates, blog posts and amusing videos. But sometimes, we have to be heavy and actually enforce the rules. The first step is the local association, which can use sample letters in the Membership Marks Manual. In most cases, the misuse is corrected once the person knows the rules, and life goes on.

If the initial letters don’t work, sometimes PAR will get involved, or it will go into the NAR compliance department, which has several employees who work primarily on compliance issues. In the unlikely event that compliance isn’t achieved at this point, things can get serious.  For example, misuse of the Realtor® marks is technically a violation of association bylaws, which can result in a complaint against the member. And on rare occasions, NAR may even end up in court – which recently resulted in a $500,000 judgment in NAR’s favor.

So please – before you go sign up for a new email account, make sure that you know the rules and that you’re living within them.