The Globe and Mail published a story this morning on the Competition Bureau’s investigation into alleged anticompetitive behavior in the Canadian real estate industry.

In a court filing, Jean-Pierre Bornais, a senior competition law officer, said 90 per cent of residential resale transactions in Canada involve the MLS database. He added that information already obtained by the bureau from industry participants indicates that the changes enacted by CREA “have restricted, and will further restrict, access to the MLS database, and have prevented and limited and will further prevent and limit, the entry and expansion of potential competitors.” The inquiry will determine whether CREA “has engaged in, or is engaging in, a practice of anti-competitive acts,” he said.
…
At CREA’s annual meeting this weekend in Ottawa, delegates approved a series of proposals that tighten listing rules and prevent homes from being put on MLS without follow up by the agent. Mr. Linney said the changes will go into effect despite the bureau inquiry.
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Last November, one of Canada’s largest online realty services, Toronto-based Realtysellers Ltd., shut down “pending a resolution of the Multiple Listing Service issues.”

Read the full Globe story here. Read the post I wrote last week here.

I just finished reading “Miles Lives per Gallon: The True Cost of Our Oil Addiction”. It’s an interesting book by Terry Tamminen, who is a special advisor on environmental issues to California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. In the book he tries to tally up the fully burdened cost of oil on society, including externalities like health costs and “defense” spending that aren’t a part of the price tag we see at the gas pump. It’s pretty data heavy, which I find appealing. That said, as in the Big Tobacco wars, it’s difficult to conclusively tie things like health problems directly to oil, except in the most glaringly obvious cases (e.g. Exxon Valdez cleanup, or pollution in Nigeria’s Delta region). While most of the book is grim, in the last few chapters he does offer some sunshine in the form of concrete suggestions on what you can do to reduce your usage of oil products.

It’s worth a read.

Updated 2007/03/24: corrected title of the book. Thanks Terry. (How embarrassing; to be caught in a typo by the book’s own author.)

Advertising continues to evolve. It used to be “cost-per-impression”: broadcast TV and radio ads, junk mail, billboards, banner ads. Then we got “cost-per-click”, the business model that powers most search engines today. Now a few companies are trying “cost-per-action”, where the advertiser pays only when a click on an ad leads to an action they define… like buying a product.

Google is apparently rolling out a broad trial of pay-per-action with some of their advertisers.

Because they are often paying for actions more likely to lead to sales than would a simple click on a link to a Web site, cost-per-action ads are often more expensive than cost-per-click ads. McGovern says that, on average, advertisers pay about 100 times more for a sale than they do for a lead on a customer, which is arguably what a click is. For example, an advertiser who is willing to pay 5¢ for a click on its baseball card ad is likely to spend $5 or more for a user who buys a baseball card.

This new approach will certainly have its challenges — new types of fraud, for instance — but I hope it goes well. Anything that more closely aligns advertising with results is good… it’s a step towards what we might call “efficient advertising”, and away from the spam-the-world approach that has dominated to date.

Now if we could just figure out how to make pay-per-action work with all that junk mail… hmmm.