Conversations about the MLS industry, creating software, and employee ownership.

Over at GigaOm, they’re running a poll asking, “Where Does Broadband Access Rank When Choosing a Home?”  When I took the poll, the leading answer was “It’s up there with a quality school district and a good location. 56% (29 votes)”.  The post specifically discusses the desirability of fiber to the home.  How many MLS systems are tracking fiber to the home as a feature?

In my recent post describing the MLS track at Inman Connect on August 6, I wrote that “the future of MLS has a lot more to do with people data than listing data.”  In fact, all the MLS sessions at Inman this year will touch on this movement in focus “from listing data to people data.”  Importantly, this trend isn’t just related to MLSs or real estate.

Wired recently posted an article describing the “full-blown battle” between Facebook and Google “over the future of the Internet.”  The article posits that Facebook is collecting a vast trove of data — people data — behind their walled garden, far away from Google’s search engines:

Hardly any of Wayne’s Facebook information turns up on a Google search, because all of it, along with similar details about the other 200 million Facebook users, exists on the social network’s roughly 40,000 servers. Together, this data comprises a mammoth amount of activity, almost a second Internet. By Facebook’s estimates, every month users share 4 billion pieces of information—news stories, status updates, birthday wishes, and so on. They also upload 850 million photos and 8 million videos. But anyone wanting to access that stuff must go through Facebook; the social network treats it all as proprietary data, largely shielding it from Google’s crawlers. Except for the mostly cursory information that users choose to make public, what happens on Facebook’s servers stays on Facebook’s servers. That represents a massive and fast-growing blind spot for Google, whose long-stated goal is to “organize the world’s information.”

In addition to having so much information tied up in Facebook, walled off from Google, the battle also is over how users identify themselves on the web:

Connect and Open Stream don’t just allow users to access their Facebook networks from anywhere online. They also help realize Facebook’s longtime vision of giving users a unique, Web-wide online profile. By linking Web activity to Facebook accounts, they begin to replace the largely anonymous “no one knows you’re a dog” version of online identity with one in which every action is tied to who users really are.

I’ve written before how important the identity issue is for MLSs.  Will MLSs step up to the plate and help their members establish an independent identity or will Google and Facebook become the standard for identity on the web for real estate professionals?

The introduction to the Wired article makes a better ending to this post, because it shows that these wars are just being waged now.  So much is yet to be decided, and that makes this an exciting time for everyone if we embrace the opportunity.

Today, the Google-Facebook rivalry isn’t just going strong, it has evolved into a full-blown battle over the future of the Internet—its structure, design, and utility. For the last decade or so, the Web has been defined by Google’s algorithms—rigorous and efficient equations that parse practically every byte of online activity to build a dispassionate atlas of the online world. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg envisions a more personalized, humanized Web, where our network of friends, colleagues, peers, and family is our primary source of information, just as it is offline. In Zuckerberg’s vision, users will query this “social graph” to find a doctor, the best camera, or someone to hire—rather than tapping the cold mathematics of a Google search. It is a complete rethinking of how we navigate the online world, one that places Facebook right at the center. In other words, right where Google is now.

I wrote this two years ago on Father’s Day.  I see some progress on data standards but it has nothing to do with RESO or RETS.  That Father’s Day has become my marking point for RESO progress is a little weird, but it is what it is.  Will RESO be any further on data standards next Fathers’ Day?  Warren Koeller’s chuckle is turning into a roar.

I’ve been traveling this week with Steve Schlangen (Captain) and Dave Rifkin visiting customers.  Here we’re just flying over Lake Tahoe.

Here we’re flying over Lake Shasta after having a great visit with our customers at the Shasta Association of REALTORS. (Thanks, Tomas and everyone, for your great hospitality!)

Captain Steve even gave Dave a short flying lesson.

Shortly after, we arrived (safely) in Newport, Oregon, for a visit with our customers at Lincoln County. (Thanks, Sue, for arranging our meetings at such a great place.  It was great to catch up with you on such a beautiful day!)

Captain Steve dropped Dave and I off and continued on to visit our customers in Tillamook and Astoria, Oregon, and now he’s back with us in Lincoln for our return flight tomorrow home to Fargo.  I hope to see you all again soon!

Further to my post yesterday, It bears repeating: The MLS is more than technology, this post from Fred Wilson on Open Platforms and Innovation states simply the reason MLSs and Associations need to think in terms of building a platform for innovation:

That’s the thing that gets me so excited to get up and get going every day. Technology has reached a point where anyone can get involved with innovation. Patents and degrees matter a lot less. Imagining something and then coding it up is what its all about these days.

We are engaged in what Eric von Hippel calls “end user innovation” and it is a fundamental shift in the way society innovates. The Twitter founders are a perfect example. They built a simple tool to share short messages and it has become something entirely different.

Inman News recently issued a call for essays on on a “new look for MLS”, asking:

• What changes do you believe are necessary and imminent for MLSs, and what types of changes do you believe will require the toughest battles?

• Will VOWs (Virtual Office Web sites) catch on? Will they ever replace IDX (Internet Data Exchange) as the dominant model for sharing property information with consumers?

• What MLS rules and policies, if any, need tweaking? Are any new rules needed?

• How will the debate over MLS-operated public-facing property-search sites be settled?

• Should MLSs send property listings information on their participants’ behalf to third-party Web sites?

• Is the regionalization and nationalization of MLS data a given? What is the perfect number of MLSs required to serve real estate professionals?

• Are we inevitably heading toward a single, national MLS? Would that be a good thing or a bad thing for agents, brokers and consumers?

I’m going to respond to all these questions in one fell swoop by using MLS regionalization as an example.  There are two distinct approaches to the regionalization challenge that have been advocated: (1) a standards based approach (sort of like CARETS and WIREX); and (2) a proprietary approach like calREDD.  (Side note: A big question for me right now is where NAR’s Real Property Resource intends to go, standards or proprietary?)

A good analogy to explain the differences between these two approaches is the web itself.  Let’s pretend the web didn’t exist but you wanted to create it.  Two distinct approaches would be: (1) start by creating an open platform on which others can create; or (2) build one system and try to get everyone else to buy/use it. The web’s ridiculous success is because it’s built on open standards and not a proprietary solution.

This basic distinction — between the open web and proprietary solutions — goes to the heart of what I believe is the purpose of MLSs and REALTOR Associations (local, state and national), namely: creating a cooperative platform on which competitors can compete.  I wrote some time ago that MLS is more than technology. This isn’t new or radical, it’s what MLSs and Associations have been doing since inception.

What is new and radical, however, is that the web is creating new opportunities for competing and cooperating and that presents many opportunities for MLSs and Associations to help their members.  Here are just some of the opportunities:

Listing Data Standards — This is the beginning of nearly everything; data standards are the base of the platform.  Without standardized data, the web as a platform for MLS is very messy, as we’re seeing right now.  Data sharing among MLSs, between brokers, with franchises, search engines, and others is all hampered by data disparities.  More positively, standardizing data opens many opportunities that are not possible or practical today, such as reliable cross-MLS statistical analysis.  One of the most important pieces of data to be standardized is a universal property ID, which I’m hopeful will be a core focus for NAR’s Real Property Resource.  A universal property ID could form a basis for linking listing data together, which is what the web is all about.

Who is a member of the MLS? Or it’s time to develop some terms of use.  I’ve mentioned this before but, today, I think consumers are, for all practical purposes, members of the MLS.  Ridiculous, you say?  Not really.  If access to the listing data is the definition of membership, then consumers are “members” in many respects.  One of the primary features of every MLS system today is the ability to email information to consumers.  Many MLS systems also offer customer portals through which agents can share listing data and interact with their customers.  Also, many agents today are really consumers who have gone through the steps to become a member.  They aren’t producing or active in the MLS but they have access.  As MLSs and Associations consider changes to the IDX, VOW and related policies, thinking of the conumer as a member of the MLS and then working to define the terms of use for that membership may lead to a new way of thinking about how agents and consumers can interact on the web.

Identity.  The web used to be all about anonymity but today it is about identity.  MLSs and Associations could be helping their members by developing standards for identifying and authorizing members across systems and the web, and sharing that information with other sites.  This is a hot topic for the web as a whole today, not just real estate, as sites like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and others require us to maintain information about ourselves multiple times with multiple usernames and passwords.  Couldn’t the MLS help members by participating in these standards efforts on the web?  This is just another example of how real estate is participating in the web evolution, and so needs to think in web terms.

Syndication.  Some good work has been started on standardizing the data format for syndication, but an equally (or more) important issue for consumers is keeping that data up to date on all the various sites.  This is a classic case where technology filled the gap from a lack of standards and created a mess.  Sites like Trulia, Zillow, Yahoo!, Google, etc., are receiving the same listings from many sources, having to de-duplicate them, and keep them up to date somehow.  The MLS remains the most accurate source of listing data and so should provide a standard for how data should be sent (transported) to other aggregators and then kept up to date. This doesn’t need to be hard and could follow some basic standards like Atom or RSS, but the discussion needs to be started to get there.  This same discussion leads back to the terms of use mentioned above — if the data is offered in an open format, who can do what with it and under what terms?

IDX and VOWs.  The recent dustup over whether Google’s indexing of an IDX site is misappropriation of the IDX data is a good example of how MLSs and Associations need to re-envision their operations in terms of the web as a whole.  By focusing on high-level standards, issues like this may be avoided or minimized in the future.

The above are just some of the key issues facing MLSs and Associations today.  The web is reinventing everything, including the way we collaborate, cooperate and make decisions.  The NAR and local Assocaitions could reinvent themselves for member benefit by putting these issues front and center on a web site somewhere and publicly debating and deciding on them.

Ajaxian posts today about Craftsmanship and UI Latency and links to a fun little experiment where you can click to see the difference a few milliseconds make in responding to a click.  I thought it might be fun for readers of the FBS Blog to try it out and then mark their responses in the poll below.  So, just click this link, run the test, and then return here to enter your vote in the poll.

When do you experience lag in response?(polls)

After a sort of late night out with some of my co-workers Friday night, I got up at about 6 a.m. on Saturday (when it was 45 degrees outside) to stand in line for the first time in my life for pretty much anything.  I’m one of those people who will drive 15 minutes more to avoid standing in line at a restaurant for 10 minutes.  Irrational, I know, but that’s how much I dislike waiting in lines.  Anyway, I’ve been a Blackberry Pearl user for about a year and I’ve been very excited to get a real keyboard again, and so I thought I’d brave the cold and the line to get my hands on the new Palm Pre.

I wrote out some pros and cons in an email this morning to Greg Kilwein and thought it would make a decent blog post, too, for those curious about my early impressions with the Pre.

The cons:

• Speed — There are some annoying delays in launching applications.  The delays really only occur in launching apps, though, and general operation is snappy once they’re loaded.  (I have had the NY Times app become non-responsive a few times, but I’m guessing that’s the app’s fault.)
• Battery life — A day of heavy use may not be possible without a charge.
• Auto-complete/correction — Palm hasn’t gotten very far yet with auto-complete/correction.  Small things like double-spacing to create a period don’t work (though using the period is easy enough) and it doesn’t correct some basics (like “I’ll”) I’ve gotten used to on my BB.
• Apps — Though I disagree with most of the criticism over the puny app store (it is a new device, after all, and Apple didn’t even have an app store at all for over a year), I do wish there was an app for Google Reader, which I used all the time on my BB.  I was, however, pleased to find a Twitter app (Twead) and a NYTimes app, and there are a few others (movie times and tickets, Internet radio, etc.) I haven’t tried yet.
• Calendar — Surprisingly, given that this is a Palm device, I’ve found the UI for the calendar frustrating.  Either I’m not doing it right, or they’ve left some basic navigation out like flipping through months.  You can flip through days but I haven’t figured out a way to flip through the months, which is something I do quite a bit.

The pros:

• Size/Keyboard — I’d say the size of the device is perfect.  It’s neither too big or too small, but just right.  The keyboard is cramped, for sure, but it seems to be a decent compromise between a big keyboard like the Blackberry Bold has and something small like my Pearl that can’t handle a full keyboard.  Also, as David Pogue says, “it’s better than typing on glass.”
• Screen — Amazingly beautiful; looking at the wallpapers/images they provide is just stunning, they’re so vibrant and colorful.
• Fit/Finish — I give it an A but not an A+.  I think the device feels very nice in my hand and is quite beautifully designed (and, as mentioned above, is the perfect size).  My one complaint is that the slider isn’t as tight as it could be, and so there’s some sideways movement between the top and bottom even when the device is closed.
• OS/UI — They’ve done a really great job here, and it mostly makes up for the speed issues.  Keeping many applications open is really handy and makes up for the short lags when loading an application (and, no, having many apps open doesn’t seem to change the speed, either with more or fewer apps running).  Organizing and accessing the applications through the “cards” also is easy and fun.  And the UI is simply gorgeous.
• Email Client — The email client is one of the best parts of the device, because it combines into one UI both my FBS and gmail accounts.  You can view them together or separate.  Awesome.  Also, it supports full HTML email and so Jira and Confluence emails look good again, which they didn’t with my Pearl.
• Google sync — Calendars and contacts, effortlessly. I mentioned this on Twitter, but I was really surprised when I found all my contacts and phone numbers loaded.  I vaguely recall syncing my BB to Google but it was still a surprise that everything just showed up on the Pre.
• Contacts — Probably because of the Google sync, the contacts just worked.  Start typing the name you want and the email, phone and other contact info shows up right away.  Very speedy.  (As mentioned above, the speed issues almost always have to do with app loading.  Overall, the speed of operation is snappy.)
• Browser — Very nice and powerful.  Supports a ton of javascript.  Google Reader even works for the most part, which means there is less need for an app, but it definitely would be better to have an app.
• Features — The device and software do so much, it’s really amazing.  In addition to basics like email, SMS, web browser, etc., it sports:
  • GPS with real driving directions over the speakerphone (it’s really like buying two devices, a phone and a GPS);
  • Sprint TV — though I doubt I’ll use this much, it’s wicked cool to be able to watch live TV on your phone;
  • Music — I also won’t use this, but it’s effectively an iPod and even syncs with iTunes;
  • Camera — haven’t used it enough yet to know the quality but the UI is quite nice;
  • Wifi — Haven’t used this yet either but I think it’s cool that it has wifi, though the Sprint service is fast enough that I haven’t cared yet; and
  • Bluetooth — necessary for hands-free in the car.

I think that’s about it.  Overall, I’m really glad I stood in line for the Pre and I’m excited to be back in the land of Palm.

MJW

Inspired by a recent post on Rain City Guide called The Third Bubble by Chuck Reilling, we ran some numbers across our 100 or so MLSs from across the country and came up with the following sides per agent trend graph:

Unlike Chuck’s graphs, this graph shows a significant flattening over the last two and a half years.  I’m interpreting that as indicating the amount of membership decline still in the pipeline may be pretty low.  Or is that just me being too optimistic?  What do you think?

I’ll be moderating the MLS track (track 3) at Inman Connect in San Francisco on August 6th, and I hope you consider coming to participate as I think we’re going to explore some interesting topics.

Thursday, August 6, 2:00 pm – 2:45 pm
Discussion
From Listing Data to People Data: The Next Challenge in VOWs and MLS Consumer Sites

Bill Chee, President, Prudential Locations
Kathy Condon, CEO, MLSPIN

I heard Bill Chee speak at MLS Connection in Portland earlier this year, and he said something to the effect that he’s far more focused on people data today than listing data.  Of course, the MLS has long been laser-focused on listing data, as it should, but the premise of this session is that the future of MLS has a lot more to do with people data than listing data.  What are MLSs doing to leverage the people data they have for the benefit of their brokers and agents?  What should they be doing?  These are the core quesions we’ll be exploring in this session.

Thursday, August 6, 2:50 pm – 3:35 pm
Presentation
The Market Analytics Opportunity: How MLSs Can Conquer the Neighborhood

Mark Allen, CEO, Minneapolis Area Association of Realtors
Bob Bemis, CEO, Arizona Regional Multiple Listing Service
Spencer Rascoff, COO, Zillow.com

I wrote about the challenge of neighborhoods awhile back, and so this topic is very exciting for me.  MLSs have some of the best data on the real estate market and yet the analytics produced aren’t always helpful to consumers.  I think one of the key reasons for this is that the geographic market boundaries are not well defined, and that a significant opportunity exists for MLSs to improve in this area.

This panel includes Mark Allen, CEO of the Minneapolis Area Association of REALTORS, who also recently launched 10k Research to help MLSs produce more consumer friendly analytics.  Bob Bemis, CEO of ARMLS, also will be participating.  ARMLS serves the Phoenix and surrounding market, and has worked closely with Mike Orr of the Cromford Report to integrate detailed analytics into the MLS system.  Spencer Rascoff from Zillow also will be joining us.  Spencer and Zillow have been focused on developing neighborhood level analytics for some time, and has become one of the go to voices for the media for trends in the real estate market.  If that isn’t interesting to MLSs, I’m not sure what is.

Thursday, August 6, 3:40 pm – 4:25 pm
Debate
Agent Ratings: Truth, Consequences or Camouflage?

Bob Hale, CEO, Houston Association of Realtors
Glenn Kelman, CEO & President, Redfin

Bob Hale from the Houston Association of REALTORS recently launched agent ratings through the MLS, and the system has already generated some interesting discussions.  Glenn Kelman from Redfin has been rating their own agents for some time.  Hearing these two dynamic personalities discuss the merits of their respective rating systems should be one of the best events at Inman.

There’s more, too, but I’m most excited about these three sessions.  I’m looking forward to learning and listening.