I was doing some research today and ran across this article, which has some very interesting quotes:
As in other aspects of Internet life, the issue has now become one of how users will focus their attention, makes choices, and avoid information overload. The online real estate situation now somewhat resembles the early phase of a Monopoly game, in which contestants try to lay claim to as much territory as possible so as to generate revenues and survive.
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Ault said that based on his own experience, giving clients the ability to sift through real estate offerings themselves online may have an effect on the structure of fees in the industry. Hitherto, he observed, agencies have been paid contingency fees–somewhat like the lawyers who get paid a percentage of cases provided they win.
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Confirmation of that scenario came at the National Association of Realtors’ Midwinter Business Meeting in February. “Changing technologies are eliminating routine jobs,” NAR chief economist John A Tuccillo told about 4,000 attendees. “Realtors who are unwilling or unable to become information providers are likely to be squeezed out of the transaction and quite possibly the profession.”
“More and more, young home buyers are doing advance research on properties and coming to Realtors to complete the transaction,” Tuccillo said. “This in turn is fueling interest in unbundled, fee-for-service payment options where the client chooses from and pays for a broad menu of services.”
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. . . an effort is underway to merge at least the adjacent states’ databases, though probably not the entire organization’s. A similar situation exists in eastern Massachusetts, he said, and with three Vermont boards already pan [sic] of that network, it would make sense to unify the region, he said.
Before GSIN, it was common for real estate offices to belong to three or four multiple listing services so they could meet their clients’ needs, especially around Manchester, NH, Perkins said. Agencies near association boarders [sic] typically had to go both ways to survive.
“We just continue to try to eliminate the borders,” Perkins said. “That’s the basic scheme: keep eliminating borders.”
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Others, said Ault, are genuinely afraid and not necessarily without reason. At national meetings on RIN. “The gut reaction of some of the Realtors when they heard the presentation by Microsoft was ‘Good grief, why does the public need us? Suddenly the middleman is going to be eliminated’.”
Actually, Ault said, “They aren’t going to want to buy these things online.” There will still be a place for local real estate expertise, but, “you’re probably going to see a great shakeout of the people who don’t want to learn the new system and the new way.”
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“Everyone is afraid of change,” Ault said. “This is definitely something that will change our industry dramatically.”
Among those who agree is Saul D Klein, president of Saul D Klein Associates in San Diego, who addressed the NAR convention in February. For the agents who survive, “five years from now, you will be as proficient on the computer as you are on the telephone,” he predicted.
The date of the article? April, 1996.
Athol Kay writes that he’s tired of agents crying like babies that the MLS data shouldn’t be used for advertising, and suggests that the existings MLSs should just make their databases open to the public on a read-only basis and charge the public for access.
Glenn Roberts over at Inman Blog asks whether the industry is ready for MLS 2.0, which supposedly is coming from the regionalization efforts in California and elsewhere, while just a few days before, Brad Inman calls the MLS one of the wonders of the real estate world.
B.R. on Realtor Genius urges NAR members to quit criticizing and take responsibility for their organization.
And Kris Berg ties it all together.
After toting around my Sony Vaio and an HP tablet for several months, I finally decided to get the Thinkpad X61 tablet from Lenovo so I could consolidate to one computer. Here’s a blurry picture of my new baby just after syncing up my iPod and Treo. So far, I’m pretty excited about it and know that my life will be simpler with just one computer.
I’ve been carrying both because the tablet is fantastic for drawing mockups of new features we’re developing. I still had to carry my Sony, though, because the old tablet wouldn’t run a projector at a resolution higher than 800×600, which isn’t effective today. Also, for whatever reason, my Treo wouldn’t pair, no matter what I tried, with the HP tablet, so I couldn’t get Internet access through my phone. These shortcomings led me to be a two computer geek for months, and it was giving me a headache.
With the X61, I’m hoping I have the best of both worlds and I thought I’d write about it here because I think a tablet is a great choice of computer for a real estate professional. The small form factor, the ability to lay the screen flat like a book for showing your clients a CMA or photo tour, and the ability to write (literally) contracts with digital ink are all killer features for real estate. The X61 I ordered has the Wacom digitizer (a must), the Intel Santa Rose processor, 2 GB of RAM, a 1 GB solid state drive, and a 100GB 7200 rpm hard drive. The last two features are noteworthy. The solid state drive seems to really help with boot and resumption times (the unit wakes in just a few seconds) and the 7200 rpm hard drive is relatively rare in the world of laptops because of the power requirements. The battery life, though, seems to be great so far. The battery lasted well over four hours last night, with quite a bit of heavy duty use moving documents.
Every time I get a new laptop, I’m filled with excitement and dread, because I really want the new features but know transitioning all my data will be a chore. I like to take advantage of the freshness of the new laptop and so I pick and choose the files to move over instead of doing a backup/restore. It’s a lot of work but worth it. I particularly wanted to start clean this time since the new tablet has Vista on it and I didn’t want to hassle with any complexities from the XP/Vista migration.
I’m not sure if this is a Vista issue or the Lenovo setup, but, for whatever reason, the ClearType fonts weren’t selected by default and so I freaked out for about an hour wondering why the screen looked so bad. After pouring over all the options (Vista hasn’t made any of that easier!), I finally saw that ClearType wasn’t turned on. Another problem has been Vista incompatibilities with the Sprint dial-up networking client, so Bluethooth is the only option right now.
Otherwise, Vista looks great with the Aero interface and the writing experience is unbelievable. I have some of the worst handwriting of anyone I know and the recognition is just fantastic, which leads me back to my recommendation of a tablet for real estate professionals. Microsoft has done a magnificent job integrating tablet functions into their OS. Once you get used to touching the screen, you’ll find a whole new world of productivity and you’ll never go back. Though the iPhone and Surface are getting tons of hype right now in the touch-screen space, Microsoft has been advocating tablets for a long time and I know I wouldn’t have anything else right now.
This post is a note of thanks to everyone participating in the RETS payload review sessions the last few days:
I hope others who attended feel as I do that significant progress was made the last two days, building on the earlier work done at the Rockville, MD, meeting in May. As Paul said in the meeting introduction, the current pace puts us on track to have the community vote on the member (agent) and office payloads in August and the bigger listing and property payloads in December.
To keep the ball rolling, the payloads work group will be meeting again in July in Minneapolis or Chicago. If you’re an MLS interested in data standards, you should consider sending a representative. Some progress also has been made on a web-based commenting system and hopefully we’ll have that complete by August to get broad community feedback before the December meeting but you can have input now by attending one of the upcoming meetings. Just keep your eye on rets.org for details.
It’s not often in-person meetings are productive. Generally, I loathe them. This meeting was a clear exception and, for that, I’m thankful.
The Real Estate Alchemy blog is well-named today, suggesting that their (Point2’s) “NLS” (national listing system) software is the solution to the DOJ lawsuit against the NAR. The only reason Point2’s software would solve the DOJ lawsuit is because the listings would no longer be aggregated, instead they would be here and there but all of them would not be anywhere. Of course, if the listings are no longer aggregated, searching wouldn’t be very effective, but at least the DOJ lawsuit would be resolved. On the other hand, if the listings are all aggregated somewhere, the DOJ’s complaints would resurface with Point2 and its members as the target instead of the NAR.
The DOJ lawsuit exists because MLS members have agreed to share listings with each other on certain terms, and the DOJ objects to those terms. However, the terms of that agreement are what allow for the aggregation in the first instance. You cannot have one without the other. It isn’t by magic or alchemy that competing brokers have agreed to share their listings, but rather through the process that is the MLS. As I’ve written before, MLS is much more than technology and understanding that just might be the difference between your being sold lead when you think you’re getting gold.
Follow-up: related link from FoREM.
Update: Jay Thompson weighs in, too.
HAR.com reports that their public web site handled 1 billion “hits” in March. I wonder if that’s page views, web server hits, or something else? Regardless, that’s a lot of traffic and is a signal to brokers everywhere that MLS portals have potential.
About five years ago at the NAR mid-year convention in D.C., I was chit chatting with Warren Koeller (one of the founders of Risco MLS and Lockbox, which were bought by FNIS and GE, respectively) and casually asked if he was going to be at the next RETS meeting. Warren kind of chuckled, which, without anything more, said to me that he’d “been there, done that.”
I’ve always enjoyed talking with Warren, as he’s been one of the true leaders of the MLS industry over the last thirty years. Despite my respect for Warren, as I heard him chuckle, I thought his skepticism over the standards was not warranted. I thought the standards would be ushering in a revolution. That was five years ago (at least), and, suffice to say, there’s been no revolution and, as I head off to another RETS meeting this week, I can’t help but think back to the experience and wisdom behind Warren’s chuckle.
I think Warren also would chuckle at Zillow and their inevitable march toward approaching MLSs for listing data feeds. They just recently started asking brokers for listings. They need critical mass, and their earlier attempts haven’t come close. Maybe they’ll get there if some of the big brokers decide to participate, but my guess is that critical mass will only come through the cooperative model of the MLS.
I’m tempted to conclude with something like, “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” But I don’t think that’s true either. Change is real and we’re in the midst of some serious changes in the MLS industry. I just think the sources of change may not be as obvious as others believe.
Happy Father’s Day to all the dads out there, especially those who’ve been there and done that.
Why is the Internet access at conference hotels so bad? It doesn’t seem to matter where I go for business meetings, if a large or even medium or small group is involved, the Internet access is terrible. I’ve been to many RETS meetings where the network just withers as people try to log on. FBS’s Software Development Group is meeting this week at Madden’s Resort in Minnesota that caters to business events like ours, and the Internet service is completely in the toilet. Isn’t this supposed to be the specialty of these businesses? They specifically market to businesses for group events. Why can’t they do a better job at what should be a core competency? Is it that they don’t consider it a revenue center, so they just blow it off? Or is it possible that they don’t consider this a core competency? Unbelievable.
Several years ago, we had to comb through the system and remove the word “agent” wherever it appeared. So, Listing Agent became Listing Member, Selling Agent became Selling Member, etc. The primary reason this had been requested was in response to legislation in several states declaring that real estate “brokers” are not “agents” for their client but rather are just “transaction brokers” with fewer duties to their clients.
We made the necessary changes but I remember thinking at the time that this legislation was a mistake for the industry as a whole. I thought then, and still do, that agents provide more value to their clients and that the industry should move in the other direction — toward assuming more liability, not less. One of the reasons consumers hire professionals is to delegate responsibility for something over which they are not experts. The less delegation real estate sales people assume, the less value they provide.
I think legislation like this and the more recent legislation banning rebates provide good examples of how lobbying and legislation is too blunt of an approach to solving problems and is just as likely to result in unintended consequences as actually solve the problem. I like to call this the bubble wrap effect, where if you press down in one area, the problem just pops up in another. The better approach is to let the market solve the problem through competition, which has the benefit of constant trial, error and correction, which is much more likely to produce the best solution over time. But humans are impatient and filled with hubris. We don’t want to wait and we think we know the answers, and so we lobby for them to be legislated.
There are two other examples of the bubble wrap effect looming in my world: (1) the craziness that has become software patents; and (2) association efforts for statewide MLS systems.
I’ll post more about patents at a later time, but suffice for now to say that 20 years of patent protection for anything to do with software is simply ridiculous. How many creators of software really need a 20-year jumpstart on their competitors in order to induce them to create in the first place? That question is rhetorical. The answer is none. Software should not be protected by 20-year patents. (For an interesting blog on this topic, check out The Technology Liberation Front.)
Regarding statewide MLS systems (not MLS but MLS systems), Saul Klein from the Internet Crusade posted recently about CAR’s efforts to create a statewide MLS system and asked: “Are we merely looking at changing the form of MLS and not the substance?” My answer to that question is yes. A statewide MLS system is the wrong solution to the goals set out by the MLS Statement of Principles by the CAR Board of Directors. Why? Because of the bubble-wrap effect. A statewide MLS system will solve some problems and create others. Sooner rather than later, the statewide MLS system will lag technologically. A statewide MLS system necessarily limits instead of increases competition. This isn’t necessary to solve the problems of data and rule inconsistency plaguing large brokers. The better solution is to create standards for data and distribution policies and let competition solve the system problems.
Before ending this post, I think it is important to note that there is a significant difference between a statewide MLS and a statewide MLS system. A statewide MLS could have a consistent set of rules but whatever regionalization solutions are proposed should maintain competition in the market for systems. Too many people get the “system” and the “MLS” confused.
There’s a bit of buzz in the blogosphere over Real Tech LLC adding polygon searching to John L Scott’s web site. Joel Burslem over at FoREM says, “It’s a neat gimmick, designed by real estate technology provider Real Tech LLC. But it’s just that, a gimmick. I gave it a shot on their web site and while fun, it doesn’t really add much to making the search experience any more intuitive.” In tune with questions I’ve posed previously, Joel goes on to say:
Unfortunately, the more time you spend searching on these sites (and I’ve spent a lot lately) – the more you realize that map based searches are still quirky, buggy and sometimes downright annoying. Scroll wheels that jump around, or having to click all over the place to zoom in and out; some sites that allow you drag the maps around, others make it down right impossible to zoom in to where you want to be.
And then Joel concludes: “I suspect that there are going to take several more generations before searching for property on a map become a truly usable way to find a home.”
Robbie, posting over at Rain City Guide, is more upbeat, “hats off to RealTech on John L Scott for raising the bar for everybody!” Robbie did note that the mapping seemed a bit sluggish from his work computer but snappy at the rocket ship he has at home. (Robbie, you should bug your bosses to get a rocket ship at work, too. 
). Some of the sluggishness may well be coming from the drawing as opposed to the actual searching.
Interestingly enough, this type of searching has been in most MLS systems for years. In the original incarnations, the Walter Zorn vector libraries were used most commonly for the drawing. These are great because they are cross-browser, but they do not scale very well and require a lot of local processing power once you have large or more than one shape and have to move them around the screen.
More recently, the adoption of canvas by most browsers (and Google’s extension of canvas into Internet Explorer) has provided significant improvements in both the scalability and visual appeal of drawing shapes in browsers. Here’s an example from our first implementation of MapServer:
The beauty of using MapServer is that it’s open source and DM Solutions Group, a leader in open source mapping, has helped us by implementing canvas support and many other tools we needed into their ka-map libraries.
The searching of the map using the shapes is actually easier than it at first appears. Thanks to some brilliant mathematicians, there are some cool point-in-polygon algorithms that make this type of query almost trivial using stored procedures in your favorite database. As long as your database is fast, the searching should be fast, too. As I’m hoping you’ll be able to see in the above screen shot, you can even do useful things like intersecting sets so you can make sure you are in the neighborhood you want and within a certain distance from work.
As Joel pointed out in his quotes above, though, the real challenge in implementing map searching is in the user interface and figuring out how to minimize the zooming often required to see the properties because of the scalability limitations of using Javascript to plot the listings on the map. We’re working now on a version that will plot in real time very large numbers of matches on the map so that users can truly use the map to explore the listings in full context from all zoom levels.
Ironically, when we first started using MapQuest Enterprise for mapping many years ago, plotting large numbers of listings wasn’t a problem. When we replaced MapQuest earlier this spring with MapServer, our clients have really missed seeing all those dots. They can see their result set still, but seeing the full context while searching is really useful. In the fall, we’ll be restoring balance to the Force by adding this capability into our MapServer implementation.
We’d love to hear from others working with mapping, particularly on the issue of the best interfaces for searching. If you want, check out and vote at this poll we ran a few months ago. In the meantime, happy map searching!
