I usually think lists of the “top” this or “most” that are pretty irrelevant but my being named by Inman News as one of the 25 most influential bloggers in the real estate industry for 2008 may be useful to bring more attention and good discussion to the hot issues in the MLS industry, especially data standards and the impact they can have on issues like regionalization, syndication, and consumer facing MLS sites.
Congratulations also to the other bloggers named and especially to those I read regularly, such as Kris Berg, Teresa Boardman, Jay Thompson, Lani Anglin-Rosales, Greg Swann, Joel Burslem, Dustin Luther, Glenn Kelman, and Greg Robertson (who is inimitable as well as notable).
P.S. One thing I wonder about is why Inman is charging to see a list. It just seems weird.
in the coolest way. Like or dislike Redfin, Kelman has a gift for communicating complex issues clearly and deeply. I don’t read many blogs right now, but I always pay attention to Redfin’s because I’ll likely always learn something. Keep on keeping on, Glenn and the Redfin crew!
The controversy over NAR’s attempt to cover up their failure to trademark MLS with claims of ethical violations rages on over a case in Sarasota, Florida. Inman News and the Bloodhound Blog report on it, and the issue has elicited huge commentary at Real Estate Webmasters. I’ve long had the position that the NAR won’t be able to put this genie back in the bottle, and trying to do so will just anger their customers. I also suggested a few times that the NAR would be better off spending their money creating a new brand to promote IDX authorized sites:
Once data standards are established, promising a strong and comprehensive data product from brokers and agents to consumers, NAR should create and heavily promote a branding and logo program for legitimate IDX sites so consumers can have confidence they are seeing everything.
With the recent VOW litigation settlement, this idea is one step nearer fruition. Now NAR just needs to shift its focus away from annoying its members and instead use their funds to help their members with a strong brand that will enhance the authority of their individual web sites. Imagine what NAR could do with their TV and other ad dollars targeted at promoting a simple brand certifying web sites that have all the data available for consumers?
Alternatively, perhaps a company like Roost or someone else (e.g., FBS with its flexmls or other brand?) will step up to the plate with such a brand. NAR can lead or follow.
During the CMLS conference a few weeks ago, the now perennial topics of raging regionals, syndication, parcel based MLS systems, and consumer facing MLS sites were still hot. I’ve covered these topics at length here on the FBS Blog for the last year or so but just started thinking about another, seemingly mundane issue that runs through all these issues, namely the best way to organize (and, therefore, search) MLS data geographically.
This issue impacts all the hot topics being faced by MLSs today: (1) regionalization and cross-MLS data sharing directly raise the questions of boundaries and geographies; (2) syndication of listings should be done in a consistent manner and the geographic data points are critical; (3) parcel maps are key to accurate geographic positioning; and (4) consumers want the easiest way to find properties in the areas in which they’re interested, and they want to see statistics and other data organized around those same areas, which requires solid and shared definitions.
Let me provide some examples to highlight the challenges. First, many MLSs have created their own “ares” or “regions” to make organizing and searching data easier. Here’s an example MLS area map from our customer in Santa Barbara.
MLS Defined Areas
The advantage of MLS defined areas is that they are easily learned by the agents and often represent the market fairly well. One of the disadvantages of MLS defined areas is that markets change, and maintaining the areas and the consistency of the data has historically been difficult. Also, as shown in the image below, the MLS defined areas raise the continual problem of the outer boundaries of the MLS. Lastly, there is some concern that MLSs defining boundaries or areas is a potential fair housing issue.
Outer Boundaries of MLS
Notice how when the map is zoomed out, the boundaries of the MLS become apparent and the issues of cross-MLS data sharing via the MLS defined areas raises all sorts of challenges.
To address some of these issues, many consumer facing web sites focus on city or zip code as the key geographic criteria, primarily because those are most familiar to consumers. The challenge with city and zip code is that they are just too broad and often bear no relationship to the actual real estate markets within the city or zip code as shown above in the first image where the zip code actually is split across two different MLS defined areas.
Zip Codes Are Too Big and Not Market Defined
To combat the problem of zip codes and cities being too big and the boundary limits and constantly changing nature of MLS defined areas, some MLSs have gone to a “grid” format that simply carves up the geography into squares or rectangles.
Map Grids Provide Consistency and Scalability But Are Not Descriptive of the Actual Market
These grids are very useful because they can easily be extended to new areas with consistency, but the problem is they do not describe the actual market, which has twists and turns every which direction and those twists and turns often mean tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in median home prices. Accordingly, market analysis is not useful based on a grid system and the grid system isn’t easily used by consumers.
New Mapping Technology Allows Custom Areas
To address some of the limitations above, some MLS systems and consumer web sites allow users to draw directly on the map to define exactly the area in which they are interested. There are several limitations to this approach in most systems: (1) many agents and most consumers don’t want to or don’t know the detailed boundaries of the true market areas; (2) the areas that are drawn are not shared with others who may want to use them as well so users can learn from each other; and (3) they aren’t consistent enough to enable gathering of statistics and other data for agents and consumers.
Yet another approach has been to gather neighborhood boundaries. Two companies working on collecting this type of data are Maponics and Urban Mapping. In addition, Zillow has put forward some neighborhood files as open source files for contributions from many.
What I’ve been thinking about recently is how we might be able to create a massive win-win for MLSs, agents and consumers by enabling the real estate professionals to contribute neighborhood information directly into efforts like those linked above. The result could be a nationwide set of neighborhood boundaries that accurately define the market areas and allow for easier organization and searching of MLS data and presentation of market statistics.
What do you think is the best approach to organizing listing data geographically?
Several months ago I posted about FBS’s growth and how we were looking to enhance our Board of Directors. I’m now very excited to announce that we’ve added the following new Board members:
Greg Kilwein — Greg is FBS’s Chief Software Architect and will bring a strong presence to the FBS Board with his nearly ten years of experience designing and building the flexmls Web system. Greg also will bring an important employee-owner perspective to the Board given our 100% ownership by our employer stock ownership plan (ESOP). Greg came to FBS directly from the Master’s Degree program at North Dakota State University in 1999, and took over management of FBS’s programming department in 2001. In addition to being on FBS’s management team, Greg also has participated on FBS’s Steering Committee and Software Development Group.
Dan Woolley — Dan is a co-founder of Woolley|Robertson Group, and a superstar in the real estate software space. Prior to forming Woolley|Robertson with Greg Robertson, Dan was the Senior VP of Technology at eNeighborhoods, where, among other major projects, he led the development of the national RE/MAX search portal, which was the first site to aggregate IDX data on a national scale. Prior to eNeighborhoods, Dan was the VP of Technology at Realigent and Homeseekers, which had purchased IRIS, LLC, the first company Dan and Greg co-founded. At IRIS, Dan created the very popular Lightning MLS access and CMA software, propelling IRIS to #192 on the Inc. 500 list in 2000. Dan also serves with me on the Board of the Real Estate Standards Organization. Dan hales from southern California, though he is currently living in Florida.
Matt Lavallee — Matt is the Director of Technology for MLSPIN in Massachussetts, one of the largest MLSs in the country. Prior to joining MLSPIN, Matt was the Web Services Manager at Professional Mortgage Partners and VP/Web Services at PMP/Technology, Inc., in Chicago, where he lead the development effort of VOW sites utilizing RETS data streams from MLSNI. I got to know Matt through the RETS development process, including our work together on the Schema Workgroup. Matt also has chaired the Query Workgroup and has been a leader in developing and promoting AtomRED for syndication in the real estate industry.
Greg, Dan and Matt will be joining me and Paul Wurzer, FBS’s founder, on the Board. I’m excited to start working with this well-rounded group as I think we all bring a lot of value to the effort and it will be interesting to see where we take the company in the coming years.
