Each morning I’m in town, I stop at my mom’s for coffee an hour before work. Mostly we chit-chat and usually have the Today show on in the background. Many times during our chats some question or other will come up to which we don’t know the answer and so I’ll take out my Treo and Google for the answer. This morning, Matt Lauer posed his annual question about where in the world he’ll be next with a riddle: An anagram of a synonym of a homophone of an even prime number. My mom quickly said, “see if that thing knows the answer.” I was skeptical but to indulge her curiousity I queried for “prime number homophone” and the first two results in the response were pages from Yahoo! Answers, with exactly what we wanted to know: Laos, is where in the world Matt Lauer will be next.
We both were amazed by this: Within an hour of Mr. Lauer posing the riddle from Amsterdam, someone from who knows where typed the riddle into Yahoo!, someone (many, actually) else answered the question, and Google indexed the result, allowing me to find it a mere minutes later on my phone from my mother’s living room in Fargo, ND. Wisdom of crowds, web 2.0, or whatever else you want it call it, that’s incredibly cool.
Go read this to glimpse why the web is changing us.
Glenn Roberts of Inman News has a great article about MLS policy on short sales today that I expect many of our clients will find useful or at least interesting.
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On a completely separate note, posting has been light here at the FBS Blog lately, mostly because nothing has been piquing my interest. I’ve been busy, too, of course, but that usually helps me post more, not less. Anyway, I suspect posting frequency will pick up again soon. In the meantime, read the excellent Inman article and let me know if you have any comments.
Last week at the RETS trimester meeting, a draft of a syndication data format was approved by the general session. A brief history:
There remains some work to do with the specification, including ensuring that the spec is consistent with the full RESO Schema. Also, the specification currently is expressed in XML/schema and the workgroup also may flatten it out and express it in a comma-delimited or other format more easily read by non-specialists. There also need to be some tweaks to allow for hit tracking from the various syndication destinations. Nonetheless, the concensus was to have some companies move forward with using the specification to better determine where improvements need to be made, with the expectation that the specification will be finalized at the August trimester meeting of the RESO in Chicago.
Personally, I’m very pleased with this result and thankful to all those who’ve worked hard on the specification. The workgroup met nearly every week in person for the last month or so to get it done, and, knowing how hard travel is these days, that’s a great commitment. Having a standard for syndication is going to be a great improvement in efficiency for distribution of listings to advertising sites and this is a major step forward in the realization of such a standard.
Once the data standard is finalized, my expectation is that a transport/update standard also will evolve to ensure that there is a standard method for ensuring that the standard data is kept up to date easily on all sites.
Arizona Regional MLS has set up a new blog called NewARMLS.com. Though one of the key topics on the blog is the conversion to the flexmls Web system, Bob Bemis, ARMLS’s CEO, appears to be looking to use this platform for a long time to come to engage members on a wide variety of issues as evidenced by recent posts on short sales and inappropriate words in remarks or directions.
I think this use of a blog by an MLS is a great way to engage members and provide news updates both by e-mail and feed readers. Of course, blogging also offers a way for members to provide feedback to the MLS. For anyone reading this who has influence over the agenda at CMLS or the Clareity MLS Workshop, you might want to consider putting together a “how to” session for MLSs to get started with blogging, because I think this is going to prove to be a great resource for MLSs who embrace it.
P.S. I think this also is likely to make the agenda for our FBS Summit, at least in one of the tracks for those MLSs interested in learning about blogging to improve their membership communications.
Paul Chaney has a great post today about quality over quantity in blogging. The best part, I think, is the end, where Paul says, “Plus, there’s good old RSS.” The idea that you need to keep posting all the time to keep people “coming back” seems silly these days. Give them a way to know when there’s something new, and they’ll come back when you’re ready. Post a bunch of crap and they won’t.
The Gateway/TREC/TBD discussions are heating up again, sort of. Re-visiting the topic seems timely with the latest iteration of the NAR PAG report recently “released” and the trimester RETS meetings in Philadelphia next week.
My take is this: The NAR may well have the cart before the horse. So far, the NAR’s PAG seems to have focused on defining a “system” for aggregation but the TREC documents avoid the fundamental question of the terms of use on which brokers and MLSs will agree to share data. Here’s a quote from the document:
Then, further down, the document says:
These two statements seem inconsistent, because an MLS or broker submitting data to TREC will be required to license that data to all other TREC subscribers and such a license is a transfer of intellectual property rights. This apparent conflict is just one of many key questions, however, regarding the terms of use for the data submitted to TREC.
The document also stresses that the data will not be publicly accessible. Yet, at the same time, the “Statement of Inevitability” at the beginning of the document lists the proliferation of “[c]onsumer-focused real estate websites” as one of the reasons TREC is necessary — to keep Realtors “at the center of the real estate transaction.” At this level, not only does the concept feel like the cart before the horse but also like trying to put the horse back in the barn, just as they’ve started to run free.
This brings us back to the core issue: What are the terms of use on which brokers and MLSs will allow others to use their data? TREC tries answering this question only in the most narrow terms (broker/agent to broker/agent, in private, behind a walled garden) but the web insists on asking a much bigger question involving not just brokers and agents but consumers and third-party aggregators and so many others. As the links above show, brokers are already answering these questions for themselves by sending listing data here and there but not yet everywhere, which creates the very real likelihood that TREC will be too late to the party.
Of course, NAR is hamstrung in fostering the necessary dialog about usage of listing data on the web by the DOJ litigation. Also, in spite of the insistence that it isn’t any such thing, TREC very well may be the first gingerly step in the direction of addressing the question of how listing data should be used on the web. Rather than being the cart before the horse, an actual implementation of a national aggregation may be exactly what is needed — and all NAR can do for now — to incubate the discussion. For this, I applaud the work of the PAG.
Like the NAR PAG, I believe this is a defining moment for real estate data on the web and I encourage the NAR to consider how it can re-visit the big issue of sharing listing data on the web. That’s what the consumers want, not having to go through an agent to access the data. For example, one of the best uses of TREC data would be for an agent or broker to create a publicly accessible web site to engage their customers. Yet, that seems off the table. I’m pretty certain the NAR PAG would have loved to create a more sweeping plan involving both public and private access, but felt it wasn’t possible. The result is the proposal focuses on implementing a closed system instead of creating a foundation on which others can build systems.
What I think would be useful is for NAR to foster a discussion among brokers, agents and MLSs regarding the Open Web and what that means for real estate. This same discussion is occurring right now with regard to the web as a whole, and Brad Neuberg recently suggested: “If we take the long term view, how can we give the web an open enough infrastructure to evolve over time and meet each generations needs, while maintaining its structure enough to actually mean something and stay true to its promise, similar to the U.S. Constitution?” He emphasizes that this isn’t so much about specific technology but rather the general philosophy: “if we define the Open Web in terms of [specific] technologies, then we risk losing sight of what makes the web special and being able to have the intellectual nimbleness to evolve the infrastructure of the web. . . . We will be fighting yesterdays battle while allowing new, proprietary technologies to take over if we focus on technologies rather than philosophy.”
This is where I think NAR can provide leadership, by fostering discussions around how aggregated real estate data can be made most valuable in an ever changing world. IDX has been and remains one of the best tools available to agents and brokers for engage with customers on the web today. Is it time to revisit the IDX policies of old? Are the same questions and controversies that arose over VOWs in the DOJ litigation still a concern? Or is it now possible to redefine IDX in a way to make it even more useful? These questions are left unanswered by TREC, for good reason no doubt, but I think they remain the core questions.
