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

There’s been a great discussion going on over at Bloodhound Blog regarding whether and when to ask visitors to an IDX site to register.  In his post If You Want to Close More Deals, Require Registration, Eric Bramlett makes the case  that requiring registration can produce more sales if you have a good follow-up process in place.  The basic premise is that requiring registration produces more sign-ups from a wider variety of people (including those not wanting to buy or sell now), and so you need an incubation process to find those ready to do business now.  In the comments to the post, there are arguments pro and con for requiring registration, with those who don’t require registration preferring to allow users the freedom to indicate when they want to register, which provides a sort of self-selecting process (fewer but higher quality registrations).

To help our IDX customers find the best options for their site, FBS recently released options in its IDX Manager to allow agents and brokers to specify registration options for each link:

There are a couple of things I think are cool about this: (1) the options can be set up for each link, so you can try different options on different links and compare how they perform; and (2) you can allow users to skip the registration requirement, which effectively turns the requirement into a request.

My personal view on registration is that I think it should be as natural to the consumer’s search activity as possible.  For example, it’s necessary and expected for users to register when they want to save something, and that’s the default behavior of our IDX links.  If you’re going to require a registration to view content, perhaps requiring for it right up front is the most natural — if you want in, identify yourself — because some arbitrary limit based on time or number of listings or searches viewed is, well, arbitrary.

Overall, as I’ve written before, I think consumers are more accustomed than ever to registering at web sites, and so asking for registration no longer has the negative connotation it once did.  I also think registration requirements are going to become more common on real estate sites as VOWs gain popularity.  As others have commented, the key is how you follow up.  If you provide a useful service post-registration and don’t spam the recipients, the consumer may just become a valuable customer making the registration a win-win.

I also realize that what matters are measurable results.  Some or all of these approaches may work better for you than others.  That’s why we’ve provided the options, for you to try and see what works for you.  As these new options are deployed by our customers we’ll collect data and report back later with which options are producing the most registrations and it will be interesting to see if we can tie the registration data to sales data to measure the real bottom line.

Let me know your thoughts on the best place to ask for or require registration during the consumer search process.

Posting here on the FBS Blog will be light or non-existent over the next two weeks as I’ll be on vacation, hopefully enjoying some boating, fishing and other lake fun at our cabin in central Minnesota.

The Inman Connect conference this last week was informative and invigorating.  I moderated the MLS track and we had some great presenters and discussions.  Before the MLS track began, however, Alfred Lin from Zappos spoke about the Zappos approach to customer service.  One example of how Zappos operates that separates them radically from others is that they pay their support trainees $2,000 to quit.  Yep, you read it right, they pay them to quit.  And not just a token, either.  $2,000 is significant.  They do this because they only want people who are committed to Zappos’ service ethic and they figure someone who will take the $2,000 isn’t committed.

I simply love this.  It’s an incredibly powerful statement.  If you think about it, every support trainee at Zappos is giving up $2,000 to work there.  Conversely, Zappos gladly pays the $2,000 to those who take it, because they’re getting radical commitment from everyone else who stays and they’re saving having to fire the others later for lack of performance.  This is brilliant on so many levels.

I mentioned this Zappos policy on Twitter and Brian Larson asked: “Should brokers do the same?“  My response: Yes.  To be clear, what I really mean is that brokers should be committed to customer service the same as Zappos and that means making sure you have the best people representing you and your customers.  This brings me to one of the MLS panels I moderated: “From listing data to people data: The next challenge in VOWs and MLS consumer web sites.”  One of the panelists was Bill Chee, who shared a pretty remarkable statistic for his brokerage: It is less than one percentage point from being the market leader in Honolulu, with 150 fewer agents than his competitor.

Bill attributes this success to their commitment to customer service and measuring the efforts of every agent and the happiness of every customer consistently and regularly through their CRM system.  For Bill, the “people data” collected in their CRM is so much more valuable than the listing data, because it helps them provide better customer service.   He knows when customers are contacting agents and how quickly they are responding.  He knows what they’re searching for on his VOW and how often they log in and engage with his agents.  From public records, he even knows when former customers are listing or buying with agents from other brokerages.

In the Q and A that followed, I asked Bill if there was any people data he thought he could use from the MLS.  He said he tried at one point but currently didn’t get any people data from his MLS.  In contrast, Matt Lavallee from MLSPIN described how their MLS is tracking all kinds of people data through the VOWs they offer.  The data regarding what customers are searching on, when they’re searching, what listings they like and don’t like, and what listings they’re visiting and buying is all being collected in the MLS system.  That’s some powerful people data.

Here at FBS, we released our customer portal feature a little over a year ago and agents have been using it quite successfully, with over 250,000 consumers having active accounts currently.  These accounts provide agents and brokers great insight into what their customers are looking for, how interested they are, and a way for the agent and customer to communicate with each other on-line.  These accounts also provide listing agents with powerful data regarding the activity on their listings, such as how often the listing is marked as a favorite, possibility or reject, how often showings are requested or questions asked, how many messages are sent about the listing, and much more.  Importantly, this customer portal activity data is combined with the activity data from within the private MLS system and from our IDX sites, to provide a more complete picture of search and viewing activity.

Again, all of this people data is very useful for the brokers and agents to provide better service to their buyers and sellers, and that’s why we think the MLS system has an important role in helping agents and brokers make use of all of this data.  Internally at FBS, we call it MeTAL: Measure, Test, Adjust and Learn.  Bill Chee is proving that MeTAL is critical to providing radical customer service and win more business.  Those are my take-aways from the Inman Connect conference this year.  What did you learn?

Brian Larson posted a detailed conclusion to his IDX series the other day, concluding that he’d recommend the NAR modify the IDX policy to:

• Define what we mean by ‘web search engine,’ identify the benign uses they make of listing data, and incorporate those descriptions into the rules.
• Say that broker IDX sites may allow and even encourage indexing by web search engines.
• If brokers are particularly miffed by the “Nancy Smith” example, MLSs can prohibit display of listing agent in IDX (as long as state law does not require it).
• Educate all brokers about how site indexing works and about technology options to allow them to take advantage of it.
• Allow MLSs to adopt a rule requiring IDX sites to display terms of use prominently on the site (but giving brokers a few months’ grace period to implement them).
• Develop a good model TOU and invite the MLSs to promulgate it to brokers; two key terms would make MLS a third-party beneficiary and would allow ‘web search engine’ use but not any other commercial use of the listing data.

I basically agree with all of this, though I think defining “web search engine” and benign uses is very difficult if not impossible to do when it comes to the web and why I think the terms of use Brian mentions are most important.

Yesterday, Rob Hahn followed up on Brian’s post with “Great Expectations, or On the Purpose of IDX“, in which he makes at least two key points:

• Purpose of IDX.  Rob agrees with Brian that defining the purpose of IDX is critical: “Without this purpose statement, one could reasonably claim that the purpose of IDX is to benefit sellers as much as possible, or that IDX is meant to empower agents to be more competitive, or whatever.”
• The Game is Over for IDX.  Rob makes the case that big brokers no longer benefit from IDX in the world of Google dominance, and speculates that the next model might be for big brokers to pull out of IDX, build great VOWs for themselves, and then encourage their MLS to build a great public web site to drive traffic to their VOWs.

I have a couple of comments in response to these ideas from Rob and the IDX issue in general:

• VOWs.  As I posted a few weeks ago, establishment of VOWs as required by the DOJ/NAR settlement raise questions about MLS IDX policies.  On the one hand, many brokers and MLSs filled the vacuum created by the NAR/DOJ litigation by expanding IDX to include lots of data, including sold information.  In other words, IDX data feeds in these MLSs look a lot like VOW feeds.  On the other hand, some MLSs, like MIBOR, continue to have a restricted view of IDX and want to keep it off the web at least in terms of indexing by search engines.  The distinction between these views seems to be squarely in front of the NAR MLS Policy Committee for investigation and possible decision this fall as a result of the IDX/scraping issue raised by MIBOR this last spring.
• Purpose of IDX.  I’ve stated before that investment in IDX by many industry participants makes changing that policy of concern, and that the NAR should not combine the VOW and IDX policies.  This brings us back to the purpose of IDX.  Though I agree with both Rob and Brian that a stated purpose would be useful in interpreting the policy and for brokers in deciding whether to opt in or out, I also think that any “purpose” of IDX only matters to the extent it is codified in the terms of use.  After all, the end result of IDX is to put listings on the web.  The web is an evolving, changing flow of information and any purpose stated today likely will change tomorrow.  As Rob points out, Google now dominates and defines the web in, perhaps, too many ways, but tomorrow it may be different.  That’s the beauty and creativity of the web and all its participants.  Declaring a purpose for IDX is useful, but, in the end, the result is that IDX allows agents to put others’ listings on their world wide web site, which, by definition, is open to the world.  Controlling that is going to be difficult, at best, and quite probably impossible.
• Re-thinking IDX.  The open nature of the web (IDX) and the closed nature of VOWs raises the question as to whether the current IDX policies of MLSs recognize these differences.  I’m hopeful that Rob’s idea about IDX going away in favor of VOWs is a stretch too far, because, as mentioned above, IDX is a vibrant part of so many franchise, broker and agent strategies today.  At the same time, the industry needs to recognize the reality of VOWs and how they interplay with IDX.
• Syndication.  One example of the evolution of the web is syndication.  Today, many franchises, brokers, agents and MLSs are syndicating listings to sites like Zillow, Trulia, Yahoo!, Google and many others.  One of the more interesting twists on this phenomenon is RealBird’s “IDX” solution based on listings in Google Base.  Tying these altogether, let’s say that Rob’s vision of big brokers pulling out of IDX in favor of VOWs coupled with an MLS consumer portal comes true.  Unless some terms of use somehow prohibit it, RealBird will continue to offer agent and broker “IDX” solutions based on the listings many MLSs are syndicating to Google Base.  This is just one of many reasons (the possibilities of a platform like Google Wave are another) why crafting a terms of use for the open web is so important and difficult, and why the industry, intended or not, is weaving a tangled web.
• Standards. (You didn’t think I’d get through a post without mentioning standards, did you?)  One possibility for tying some of these issues together is to focus on the syndication standard developed over the last year or so.  At a basic level, syndication is very similar to IDX in that both are focused on advertising listings.  If that’s true, wouldn’t focusing IDX policy on the same data fields identified in the syndication standard make sense?  If we could standardize IDX on the syndication data set, that also would solve many of the cost issues associated with processing so many disparate IDX feed formats.  Having a standard format for IDX also would make crafting a more standard terms of use easier.  Getting there will be challenging, of course, particularly given the wide adoption of IDX, but the long-term payoff could be significant for the entire industry.

I’m heading off to San Francisco tomorrow for the Inman Connect conference, where the issue of VOWs will be front and center for the panel called “From Listing Data to People Data: The Next Challenge in VOWs and MLS Consumer Sites.” Join me there for the continuing discussion or leave a comment below.