The discussions across the country about consolidating MLSs rages on. In some areas, however, the focus appears to be more on who leads the consolidation than on the goals sought to be achieved. This conflict is similar to that created by Microsoft, which has created a de facto standard in many areas of technology. Some people laud the benefits of “standardizing” on Microsoft technologies and others recognize this as creating a monopoly and not a standard.
Similarly, to the extent MLSs advocate “their” MLS (system or vendor) as the “standard,” they are seeking to create a monopoly instead of competition. To some, reducing all MLSs to one system may at first appear to hold great allure. After all, as I’ve written previously, there are brokers experiencing real inefficiency (also known as pain) in dealing with multiple MLSs with many different rules and data formats, requiring entering listings many times, dealing with many different data feed formats, and paying many fees.
Reducing these disparities to one MLS certainly is one way to reduce these pains. The problem is that cramming all MLSs into one big one simply creates a monopoly and, eventually, the lack of competition will become stultifying and those same brokers calling for merger now will be crying for competition tomorrow when their interests ultimately diverge from those of the monopoly they created.
But there is a better way. Standards do not have to be created by choosing one vendor or creating one MLS. Rather, standards are about agreeing on the basics, the core, the non-competitive aspects of the business. For local MLSs, there certainly is an opportunity to solve real pain being faced by regional brokers by focusing on data standards (RETS) to allow single entry of listings.
If standards are followed, a listing can be entered once in any standards compliant system and then distributed to where the broker directs, eliminating the need for multiple entry points. Importantly, however, standards do not require choice of a particular point of entry (a monopoly), but rather enables choice among many standards compliant points of entry. This choice is what creates competition and competition is necessary to evolve the standard over time.
This last point deserves emphasis. Standards must evolve. Evolution requires competition. A single MLS does not enable competition. This is true for both the MLS and the vendors chosen by the MLS. One theory of regionalization says that if all MLSs were consolidated to one, competition could still occur at the vendor level. Vendors could code their systems to work with the “one MLS” and the many vendors that would be interested in this broader, bigger MLS would create more competition, not less. There is merit to this argument; it, too, has allure.
In practice, however, I believe the idea is flawed for two reasons. First, as I wrote a few months ago in a post called MLS Systems and Gateways, Front, Back and Middle, the need for brokers and agents to differentiate themselves will result in their selecting vendors that have capabilities not supported by the “one MLS” and so the goal of a single back end will be frustrated quickly by competition itself. Second, and more importantly, competition among MLSs is equally important as competition among vendors.
Despite being derided nearly incessantly over the last few years, the local MLS serves a critical function of providing true representation to the local brokers and agents. The local MLS can and will respond much more quickly to the local needs than will a monolithic state or national entity. The reason local MLSs have been attacked as being backward and inefficient lately is not because they are not responding to local needs, but rather because they are not responding to broader regional needs. The biggest complaints against the local MLS come from new entrants to that MLS, those trying to expand their markets from one region to another. When this happens, the brokers entering their next local MLS market see the differences from where they came and start cringing in pain as they recognize all the work they’re going to have to do to alter their business processes to accommodate the new rules, data formats, systems, etc. But the fact that these new entrants to the market feel ill-served does not mean that those who formed the MLS in the first instance feel ill-served. To the contrary, those whose home market is that local MLS more often than not feel well-served by their MLS. (If this were not the case, then they would change it. If anything, I think that MLSs should become even more local or micro, which would be possible with the distributed national repository idea I floated awhile back.)
Given that the local MLS serves a purpose in responding to local needs, the question becomes how to solve the pain experienced by new entrants or larger regional concerns? The answer? Standards, of course. By supporting standards, the local MLS can accept data input from other MLSs, reducing the need for duplicate entry, and ease the pain of processing data being received from the MLS. I also believe local MLSs could work better together on more common rules. This is one of the main reasons I started the Future of MLS Wiki. The Wiki hasn’t gotten a lot of traction yet, but often good ideas take time. 
To those that would argue that such broad standards are difficult to achieve, I would agree. However, agreeing on broad and deep standards is easier than forcing mergers on unwilling participants. Moreover, the standards process is far less costly and could be executed faster than the politics of merger will allow. Most importantly, though, merger results in monopoly and that is the biggest cost of all.
As promised, we’ve mined our MLS usage statistics for wireless access. The following chart speaks for itself:
The numbers along the Y axis in this and the following chart represent web server hits. I first tried to create this graph to show numbers based on a percentage of non-wireless hits, but the number was so small that four decimal places were needed to show the first non-zero number. We’re talking a comparison of many millions versus tens of thousands of hits. Mark Flavin’s question of whether cell phone access is necessary has a conflicting two part answer: 1) wireless usage on our system has more than tripled in one year and increased thirteen-fold in two years, showing its increasing popularity and acceptance; and 2) the share of people using wireless is still incredibly small. It would be easy to draw the conclusion that the service is unnecessary given the small percentage of overall hits, but the sharp increase in usage would seem that the technology is worthwhile to those using the wireless system.
The chart below breaks down system access by mobile phone operating system. The iPhone took no market share from the Blackberry other than perhaps slowing its growth for a month, but Palm has really been impacted. Windows CE took a small hit but not as severe as Palm. It’s not too surprising that the iPhone rose immediately to a level above any other device. It’s likely due to the ease of use and speed of navigation as compared to other devices; it’s just simply easier to visit more pages in the same amount of time with the iPhone.
Years ago, when we first began researching wireless platforms, we narrowed our choices down to WAP/WML, HTML, or development of a native application for the Palm OS via the CodeWarrior tool. At the time, we chose to begin development in both HTML and WAP/WML systems. By the time we completed and released our short-lived WAP/WML system, HTML was becoming available on more phones at the time and proved to be much more powerful, forgiving, and accommodative with regard to the reuse of code than the card-based navigation system that WML provided. We dropped WAP/WML support after a short period of time and blazed ahead with HTML wireless access even at a time when most mobile phones had browsers capable of displaying only a few lines of text with about twelve characters per line. This eventually proved to be a good decision since HTML browsers are now available on nearly every Internet-enabled mobile phone and standardization of mobile browsers on HTML allows us to reuse our code from our non-wireless MLS system.
With wireless usage being such a small percentage of the total, is it worth the investment? Michael Seguin talks about how the existing wireless systems have a questionable ROI from an MLS’s perspective, but the current wireless systems are the forefathers of much richer future mobile experiences. This makes the investment from our MLS vendor perspective worthwhile. Any development that leads us to improvement of the wireless usage experience will be a long-term success for us since we believe that mobile access is going to become nearly a requirement in the future. Imagine the MLS system features that could be developed if the features of the iPhone and Microsoft Surface were combined with a GPS and a laser measurement tool. The device could be used to look for property while driving around neighborhoods. If there were a house for sale, the house could be driven by and the device would display all of the information that’s available about that listing. Also, imagine having one of those devices while entering a listing. The listing could be entered on-location, marking the features of the home while walking around it. Geocoding would be instant and accurate. There would be no more speculation about where to place the listing on the map in the MLS system because the latitude and longitude coordinates could be read directly from the device. Floor plans could be entered simply by walking around the house using the laser measurement tool while the software builds a floor plan from laser and GPS feedback. If the existing wireless systems are a precursor to such powerful future tools, the investment is well worth it from our perspective.
The introduction of the iPhone has blurred the line between our wireless access to the MLS system and the regular MLS system thanks to its inclusion of a fully featured version of Safari. Since our MLS system supports Safari in cases where Safari is capable, iPhone users can use flexmls® Web without entering through the wireless access site. However, because the iPhone’s web page rendering engine displays the MLS system as it would appear on an average-size desktop screen, it requires use of the zoom feature which quickly grows tiresome. So, shortly after the iPhone was released, we installed an upgrade for the wireless version of our system that makes the content available for iPhone users in a manner that did not require use of the zoom feature by adjusting the window size.
The iPhone has raised the standard for mobile web browsers. It has not only increased accessibility of real (not stripped-down “mobile”) web content, but has improved yet again the ability for FBS and all other web developers to reuse code during development of new features for both the desktop and mobile platforms. In fact, with the iPhone, there may not even need to be significant code differences between the full MLS system and the wireless system; the need for separate code may cease as mobile browsers become increasingly like desktop browsers. The next few years will be full of exciting developments in the mobile browser arena, ultimately helping us enable our end users to run entire businesses from a mobile phone.
What do you think? Is wireless access to the MLS system completely useless, a novelty for the few, or a necessity?
There’s a running joke in our office about my repeated failure to predict the beginning of the downturn in the number of agents. I’ve been saying for years that the number of agents would be declining “any time now” and I’ve been wrong for years. In fact, I’ve been wrong for so long I began to doubt whether it would ever happen. As I speak with MLS executives across the country, very few are actually predicting any major downturns in agent numbers in their markets.
Yet, today I read about Foxton’s on the east coast about to declare bankruptcy. And there’s speculation in the Twin Cities area about agent malaise. And the growth in agents at the national level flattened some time ago. Are we about to see a significant decline in the number of agents? What are you seeing in your market?
Lani Anglin is one of the writers at the Bloodhound Blog as well as her own R.E. Revealed and Beautiful Chaos. Tragically, Lani’s brother, Aaron, was killed in a car accident this past Sunday. Aaron’s wife, Aleisha, and two children, Eleanore (1) and McKenzie (6 weeks!), were in the car with Aaron but survived. You can help Aaron’s family by making a donation.
I don’t know Aaron or his family personally, but I do share with him having recently been confirmed in the Catholic faith. Through the confirmation process, I learned a lot but mostly reaffirmed my core belief that God is love. Just a month or so after I was confirmed, my father-in-law, Henry (one of the big inspirations to my seeking confirmation), passed away after a tragic accident. Henry’s passing has been and continues to be very painful for all of us, and only bearable due to the love we shared with him.
Often, after a tragic loss, people console by saying that “it’s God’s plan” or something along those lines. Before Henry’s passing, this would make me cringe, for I’ve never believed that “God” plans anything of the such. Following Henry’s death, though, it struck me that what people really mean by this is that facing painful moments like these is a blessing because, later, it allows you to empathize and love others when they encounter similar pain. Without having experienced that pain yourself, reaching out in love isn’t as easy if it’s possible at all. This is just one of the many ways that God is love.
So, though I don’t know Aaron or Lani or their family, I do love them. And I cry with them.
The technical blogs are buzzing about Six Apart’s call to use open standards for social networks and Google’s leaked announcement that it will be creating new APIs opening up access to the “social graph” data in their system. Through all this, the most interesting comment I found was on the TechCrunch post, with the parts I found most interesting highlighted:
What everyone still seems to not understand is that Facebook is becoming the new Internet. Consider the general trends:
1. Nerds create web to share info with one another
2. Businesses create content to attract non-nerds
3. Penetration and adoption rates skyrocket; web becomes messyRight now, the web is over-run. It’s just simply ugly and the value of each additional bit of content is constantly decreasing as is the chance that that bit of content (or application) will be able to attract a user’s attention.
4. Social networks pop up, offer walled experiences
5. Users rely on aliases to articulate identity, interact
6. Social networks not sticky; offer limited data to businessesSo at this point a user has multiple online homes and also touches multiple vendors through separate accounts. They are still going outwards to businesses and outwards to find information (on this increasingly ugly web).
7. Sites like Mahalo spring up to re-organize the web
8. Facebook stays closed, but allows the outside web to come in
9. Users must selectively choose which elements of the outside web they let in to facebook.Ultimately it appears that Facebook is simply building out a cleansed version of the Internet. And yes, many of the applications are annoying and wonky, but look a bit more down the road –> they have the guys who were going to launch Parakey and eventually they’ll likely have a majority of the web-savvy world on their application, which doesn’t look kindly on aliases and fights spam with a really big sword.
So all of this said, I’m not sure that what Google is coming up with can beat this unless
a) they give each person/user an individual public and private web presence (think google people pages…we can’t assume wink, peekyou, spock will make it) or
b) they let people interact with different levels of a “cleansed†web.
One can only assume that whatever move they make will ultimately be to the benefit of Ad partners, as well, by giving more targeted info.
So either way, exciting times it seems like. Just wish Google would acquire facebook and make the world an easier place to interact with.
Isn’t this highly relevant to the Future of MLS?
Mark Flavin has an interesting post today about the usefulness of wireless access to MLS systems. We’re going to review some statistics regarding usage of flexmls wireless access, and will post on that analysis when we’re done.
In the meantime, the idea that demand can sometimes outstrip usefulness made me think about RSS feeds and the MLS system. What are the best use cases you can think of for RSS feeds and the MLS system? Hot sheets, perhaps? An RSS reader doesn’t seem to be the best way to review new or changed listings. A replacement for automatic e-mail updates? Again, readers seem ill-suited to this purpose. Anyway, what are your thoughts on how RSS could be made useful in MLS systems?
Greg Swann has been writing about his frustrations with monopoly software vendors, and now it’s my turn. A few months ago, I purchased a new x61 tablet PC from Lenovo. When I purchased it, I had no choice but to order Vista Business with it. From the moment I booted the tablet, I’ve had nothing but problems. Despite having 2 GB of RAM and the latest dual-core ULV processor from Intel, the thing has been nothing but a dog. Worse, it’s a dog that barfs on my shoes about once a day, and then stares back it me with this really big blue eye.
In July, we had our annual client Summit and I was about to present to 80 people when I slipped in a USB drive to play a video for them only to watch in horror as Vista froze and failed to re-boot. The thing was toast. We had to get another laptop for the presentation, and I went through the rest of the Summit without a laptop. Only after it was all over was I able to spend time to recover it. Of course, these days no one ships disks with the computers you buy and so I had to figure out how to recover it without a disk, because I certainly wasn’t smart enough to burn the ever-necessary recovery disk.
Since then, I’ve struggled and limped along, basically enduring the agony because I don’t have six or eight hours to rebuild the OS or whatever it will take. This afternoon, however, I thought I saw the light. One of my co-workers knew of my woes and sent me a link from CNET indicating that Lenovo was providing a “downgrade” option for those frustrated with Vista. I was psyched by this, because it seemed far easier than trying to get Vista to work.
So, I called Lenovo and asked them to ship me the downgrade:
“Sure,” they said, “can we have your credit card number?”
“For what?”, I responded.
“Sir, the downgrade costs $45.”
First, silence, then, with Greg’s blog posts rolling around in my head, I muttered, “that’s morally objectionable.”
(Actually, I was thinking, why didn’t I buy a Mac? Oh, yeah, Apple doesn’t have a tablet.)
“Seriously, you want me to pay to fix your problem? I bought the extra warranty already, doesn’t that get me something?”
“No, the downgrade costs $45. What’s your credit card number?”
“I’m not giving you one, please transfer me to your supervisor.”
“There’s nothing he can do for you either, sir, is there anything else I can do for you today to make you happy?”
“Sure, send me the XP disks.”
“Can I have your credit card number?”
“No, transfer me to your supervisor.”
Around and around this went, with me finally getting to a supervisor, only to hit the same brick wall. I finally said, “Look, I’ll pay the $45 but first I want you to say that Microsoft and Lenovo suck and charging me the $45 is illegal and morally objectionable.”
“Sir, I can say that Vista has issues but I can’t say the rest.”
I said, “Sure you can, just do it and we can end this call.”
He responded, “If you pay me a million dollars, I’ll say it, but not for $45.”
“I knew this was all about money. Alright, here’s my credit card . . . I hope AMEX doesn’t question this million dollar charge.”
If Microsoft was not a monopoly, they’d be apologizing every day for the piece of crap they unleashed in Vista on the world. Instead, they blithely believe it is okay to charge people to downgrade. This hubris will be their downfall.
A day or so ago, I suggested, again, that advertising supported web sites will have a hard time building a successful listing portal, which I’ll define as having a critical mass of listings for sale in the relevant market. A comment to this post responded:
Yeah, you’re right. It’ll never happen.
Or will it?
http://www.geekestateblog.com/googles-real-estate-strategy/
The way they’re approaching this, nobody will care who “owns†an MLS, and that’s close enough for me.
First, I don’t believe I said it would “never” happen, though I did say I thought it was unlikely. Why do I believe this? Because a site supported by advertising inevitably will sell ads that conflict with the listing content, and so the sellers and brokers placing that listing content will conclude that their listings are better placed elsewhere.
At about the same time this discussion was occurring, TechCrunch posted about the New York Times’ decision to remove its pay wall for its opinion content. Duncan Riley concluded that post:
Most importantly: this is a win for all of us. The notion of paying to access content is flawed in a connected online world where virtually everything is free, particularly content. Companies such as the NY Times can make money from providing content for free. The fall of the model for all publications is nigh.
This certainly sounds authoritative. Also illuminating, however, were some of the comments:
There is one exception to this – online magazines like Consumer Reports, that will never accept advertising to avoid the possibility of a conflict of interest affecting the sincerity of their product and service evaluations.
* * *
Sooner or later micro-payments will take hold. People may not like paying for content, but the popularity of browser software extensions like AdBlocker and Flashblock indicate that quite a few don’t like ads either.
You can’t have “free-as-in-beer†and block all advertising at the same time. Someone has to pay the bills for the servers to run and the content to be produced.
Or to put it another way, there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch…
These comments are more along my way of thinking, but let’s go back to real estate for a minute. With the exception of Realtor.com, the current advertising supported sites don’t have anywhere near complete coverage. And even Realtor.com has significant gaps in certain parts of the country, like the Pacific Northwest. Why is this? Because of the conflicts produced by advertising.
This may be a stretch, but I think the first broad-scale successful listings portal will be more like Consumer Reports — comprehensive listing coverage with expert analysis, not conflicted by ads.
Joel Spolsky is my favorite writer on software development. Period. As said on other blogs, required reading.
