Check out Pat Kitano’s summary on the Transparent Real Estate blog of the key note speech NAR’s CTO Mark Lesswing gave at a tech fair Pat attended last week. If you’re interested in a few more details, there are a couple of slide shows from Mark’s presentations posted over at the RETS site. This slideshow download is from a presentation Mark gave a few months ago at the Clareity conference and covers some of the same topics highlighted in Pat’s summary, including a review of the RETS standards and Mark’s thoughts on making real estate web sites better lead generators by focusing on user’s intentions. Since the slides don’t do Mark’s in-person presentation justice, here’s a quote from Doc Searl’s seminal post on what he calls the “Intention Economy”:
The Intention Economy grows around buyers, not sellers. It leverages the simple fact that buyers are the first source of money, and that they come ready-made. You don’t need advertising to make them.
The Intention Economy is about markets, not marketing. You don’t need marketing to make Intention Markets.
The Intention Economy is built around truly open markets, not a collection of silos. In The Intention Economy, customers don’t have to fly from silo to silo, like a bees from flower to flower, collecting deal info (and unavoidable hype) like so much pollen. In The Intention Economy, the buyer notifies the market of the intent to buy, and sellers compete for the buyer’s purchase. Simple as that.
The Intention Economy is built around more than transactions. Conversations matter. So do relationships. So do reputation, authority and respect. Those virtues, however, are earned by sellers (as well as buyers) and not just “branded” by sellers on the minds of buyers like the symbols of ranchers burned on the hides of cattle.
The Intention Economy is about buyers finding sellers, not sellers finding (or “capturing”) buyers.
(Emphases added.) I think it’s fantastic that Mark is delving into this area as he criss-crosses the country on behalf of the NAR. Here’s an idea for Inman Connect: Mark could moderate a panel on web 2.0 lead generation, with the panelists being Greg Swann or Teri Lussier (discussing Greg’s “insanely great hyper-local weblogging strategy”), Kevin Boer of 3Oceans Real Estate (discussing the “world’s most internet-marketed property”) and Jim Duncan of RealCentralVA (discussing “hyper-local blogging success” with RealCrozetVA). I haven’t been to Inman for years, but I’d go to hear that panel.
Back to Pat Kitano’s summary, I was interested to hear that Mark has added something about “MLS gateways – combination but not merger of multiple MLS systems” (Pat’s words) to his speech. Mark also mentioned that topic in his presentation (slide show download) at the RETS meetings in Austin. I hope to learn more about that in the future.
Forgot to add that about 3 members of my staff and I would even travel from Latin America to show up at Inman to see that same panel.
I have trackbacks turned on in WordPress but, for whatever reason, they don’t work. I’m new to this whole blogging thing and that’s one of many issues I need to figure out still. Nonetheless, I do read your blog and haven’t commented largely because of the hints you’ve been dropping about some software to come and I was waiting to check that out. Regarding your idea of “acting on the data in place”, how does that work with a query from an agent or consumer? For example, let’s say a consumer wants to search data from two or more different MLS systems, how would this wholly distributed approach work? I would think there could be some serious performance challenges.
As an aside, we have some clients in Venezuela using our flexmls Web software as a listing management tool for their franchise. They’ve also been expanding to other countries and are doing some exciting things.
Michael, you should definitely come and check out Bloggers Connect http://www.realestateconnect.com/sf07/bloggersconnect.aspx
We’ll be talking about many of the issues that you raise – many of the names you mention will be there too.
I am a big fan of Mark L. He won the innovator award because he is constantly pushing the beast. Go Mark! GREAT panel idea for Connect. We will make it work in SF.
8:49 am
We wrote a blog post about the combination but not merger of MLS gateways after I “discovered” your awesome blog during a carnival.
http://forsalebylocals.wordpress.com/2007/03/26/technical-thoughts-moving-towards-transition-of-the-mls/
I never seem to be able to post trackbacks (or you dont accept them **cough, cough**) so you may not have seen it. We’ve also posted an entire series on displaying contextually sensitive real estate content to visitors on our blog (its on the right hand menu)