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

A quick post this morning inspired by a Kristen Carr tweet about Liam Dayan’s post some time ago about using IDX and VOWs together. A quick excerpt from Liam’s post:

Frankly, handled right registration can be converted from being a barrier into being a feature. Think velvet ropes and VIP rooms. Also, that consumer objection to signing up is just generally getting quieter and smaller every day as people’s use of social networking mediums that demand sign-up for participation grows. Add single sign-on mechanisms, either individual or one of the social media platform initiatives like OpenID, etc. and this becomes negligible.

And BTW? There’s nothing in the language of the VOW agreement or any other I know of (big caveat on that one) that precludes a broker from maintaining both of those feeds. That introduces some interesting hybrid UX/reg-path possibilities. This is a very solvable problem.

This is all very relevant to our Summit meetings this week, where we’re covering a lot of material on our customer portals and how they create opportunities for improving service to customers through people data. Go read Liam’s entire post.

I’m excited that Bill Chee will be one of the presenters during the MLS Track at Inman Connect on August 6.  The topic will be “From Listing Data to People Data: The Next Challenge in VOWs and MLS Consumer Sites”. In preparing for the sessions, I watched Bill’s 1993 (yes, 1993) “Lions Over The Hill Speech”, which, thankfully, NAR has archived and made available on the web.

Watching the video in retrospect, sixteen years later, is fascinating and instructive. This speech pre-dated Realtor.com, Google, and all the other recent lions. If my memory serves me correctly, the initiative approved here resulted in RIN and ultimately Realtor.com, the most popular real estate search portal on the web today. Interestingly enough, there are some new “lions” over the hill today on that top 10 list, and Google is seen as the biggest lion of all.

One of the key questions I’ll have for Bill Chee at the Inman conference is whether listing data really is a non-issue today because it’s everywhere, or whether opportunities remain to leverage the data quality from the MLS for consumer benefit through VOWs and IDX. Bill said recently at the MLS Connection conference in Portland that “people data” is the key today, and I’m very excited to learn more about how that fits into the site he’s created at Prudential Locations and how that helps him provide better service to his customers.

Following Brian Larson’s recent posts on the IDX scraping issue, he and I spoke on the phone for a bit (well, Brian and I never talk on the phone for just a bit) and during that discussion I suggested:

• Terms of Use.  MLSs providing IDX feeds should require a terms of use document be placed on the site hosting the IDX data, just as is required for VOWs.  At a minimum, those terms of use should prohibit any misappropriation of the data and give the MLS the third-party beneficiary right to pursue claims against any party misappropriating data from the IDX site.
• Revisit IDX Data Fields. It’s hard to put the genie back in the bottle, so to speak, but the availability of VOW data feeds now squarely raises the question of whether the IDX data set should be reconsidered.  More specifically, with VOW feeds now being available in all MLSs, is there reason to consider changing the IDX data set to only those fields considered an “advertisement” so that the issues of indexing and scraping are less of a concern?  As I’ve suggested on Brian’s blog (MLS Tesseract), the purpose of IDX is to put listings on the open web and the way people find stuff on the open web is through search engines, which means indexing.  Instead of preventing indexing, perhaps a solution is to limit the amount of data in an IDX feed so that the terms of use can be crafted in a way that provides proper protection given the reality of the open web?  The reality is that IDX policies have been expanded to include more and more data over the last several years because the VOW litigation was on-going.  Now that the VOW litigation is settled, however, and there’s a way to provide the data consumers demand, perhaps the expansion of IDX data feeds should be re-considered to better fit the terms of use that can be enforced practically?
• VOWs.  I know, I know, consumers hate to register.  Get over it.  VOWs (requiring users to register and identify themselves) are critical to crafting a proper terms of use balanced between the open web and consumer access to data.  The difference is clear — IDX is open to the world, VOWs are open to consumers willing to identify themselves.  The data you can provide through a VOW is pretty much the entire MLS and that means consumers can get what they want, they just need to show they are a real person and agree not to steal the data.  Is that too much to ask?  What other terms should there be?

For those who’ve been reading the FBS Blog for some time, you’ll know I’m a big proponent of the web and working with MLSs and their members to make the most of it.  Crafting a balance between the data available in IDX and VOWs and the terms of use for each is important for MLSs to fully embrace the web and help members engage with consumers on the web.

As I mentioned the other day, lots of people have written about Google’s recent updates to their real estate search and the discussion continues.  While I didn’t find a lot new or interesting there, another bit of information leaked about Google yesterday that is interesting: “Google plans to announce in coming weeks that it is turning each of the one million plus Google Apps customer domains into an OpenID provider, enabling millions of people to log in to OpenID-supporting websites with their work, school or organization ID.”

This is the identity issue I’ve mentioned several times in the last few months.  As the Read/Write Web article concludes:

In other words, this move by Google could kill the spirit of OpenID by drowning the letter of OpenID with support. We think we’re logging in to websites with our work or school ID, and OpenID lovers think we’re logging in with OpenID, but we’re actually logging in with a Google-controlled ID. All the heavy lifting would be done, Google would take care of the data storage and probably offer some neat value-added features. All the companies involved would have to do is hand online identity provisioning over to the company that they have already purchased email, calendaring and document sharing from. (”They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety,” Ben Franklin once wrote, “deserve neither liberty nor safety.”)

At least it’s not Facebook!

So goes the wrestling of titans, on the very playing field created by champions of the free and independent little guy.

These web infrastructure issues are much more important, in my view, to the future of MLSs than whether Google displays ads for real estate listings on a map.

There’s a lot of buzz the last few days over Google’s recent updates to its real estate search.  Here’s a quick run-down of some of the posts that have come through my feed reader:

Google Lat-Long Blog: Improving real estate search on Google Maps

Agent Genius: Real Estate Search – Google to Punk Your Local MLS? Is It Possible?

Real Central VA: Google Assumes It Is A Foregone Conclusion

Property Owl: All Eyes on Google

GigaOm: Why Google is a Fair-Weather Friend

FoREM: Google Gets Serious About Real Estate Search

Bloodhound Blog: Web 2.0 Still Hasn’t Mastered The Real Estate Mantra: Location, Location, Location

Read/Write Web: Google Updates Its Real Estate Search, Should The Competition Be Frightened?

Screenwerk: Google “Real Estate” Not New

VAR Buzz: Google Enters The Real Estate Biz

Undoubtedly there are others I’ve missed as well.  What’s all the fuss about?  As Greg Sterling points out, that Google is displaying real estate listings on maps isn’t new.  Nor is it new that Google is accepting real estate listing into Google Base.  This is where I think posts such as Benn Rosales’ over at Agent Genius are a bit off the mark in suggesting that this could be the end for local MLSs.  Google hasn’t created anything very new or exciting with their latest improvements and sites like HAR.com, HomesDataBase, Yahoo! Real Estate, Zillow, Trulia and many others are already more well-developed with greater listing coverage than Google.  Moreover, Google is getting many of its listings from local MLSs.

(Also of important note here: I do not yet see any connection between Google’s indexing of IDX listings and their maps.google.com/realestate site.  Instead, all the listings appear to be coming from Google Base, which is populated from local MLSs, brokers, agents, and consumers and doesn’t involve IDX at all.)

So what is new?  Well, Google clearly is continuing to be interested in the real estate space as they’ve invested additional development resources into the product.  They also are trying to find a home for real estate by using the URL maps.google.com/realestate.  In fact, if you type the term “real estate” into Google’s search, they’ve created a little promo for their new site.  I also think this development from Google is a sign that they believe they have a robust enough representation of listings to make it worthwhile, and my guess is that they achieved this by working with MLSs and syndication firms like ThreeWide or RealEstateBook or others.  If I haven’t made the point already, my guess is that the majority of listings are coming from MLSs (but I’d love to see some real numbers on the data sources).

A couple of things I find interesting about Google’s implementation:

• World-Wide Mapping of Listings:  If you zoom way out, you can see the beginnings of world-wide coverage.
• Plotting All Listings:  Instead of just plotting a hundred or so, Google is plotting all the listings nearly all the time (except when zoomed way out).  This is the same approach we took with our mapping, because it gives users a better perspective on all the results.
• Potential: Of course, when Google sneezes, the world catches a cold these days.  Accordingly, paying attention to what they’re doing is smart.  The most interesting question is when will Google integrate the listings into organic search results.  In other words, when will they join more firmly the Base listings with indexed listings and how will they resolve the conflicts?  My guess is that they’ll prefer the listings from the higher quality sources, which, in my view, are the local MLSs.