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:
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.
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:
The pros:
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.
There’s been quite a dustup over the decision reportedly made by the Indianapolis Metropolitan Board of REALTORS® (MIBOR) that their MLS IDX rules against “scraping” also prohibit Google from indexing an agent’s site showing IDX listings.
For a bit of background, indexing is what Google does — it crawls the web and creates indexes of as much of it as it can so that when people search on Google it can return relevant results quickly. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about scraping (with some emphases from me added):
Web scraping (or Web harvesting, Web data extraction) is a computer software technique of extracting information from websites. Usually, such software programs simulate human exploration of the Web by either implementing low-level Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), or embedding certain full-fledged Web browsers, such as the Internet Explorer (IE) and the Mozilla Web browser. Web scraping is closely related to Web indexing, which indexes Web content using a bot and is a universal technique adopted by most search engines. In contrast, Web scraping focuses more on the transformation of unstructured Web content, typically in HTML format, into structured data that can be stored and analyzed in a central local database or spreadsheet. Web scraping is also related to Web automation, which simulates human Web browsing using computer software.
The highlighted sentence is where the confusion begins on this issue. Scraping and indexing are closely related. That they are different, however, is emphasized by the important words “in contrast” that follow the “closely related” sentence. Put together, indexing is “closely related” to scraping but it is “in contrast” to it in what I think are important ways, namely the resulting use of the data. I’ll expound on this more below, but, for now, back to the controversy at hand.
In responding to the post on Agent Genius, Hilary Marsh from NAR said:
. . . questions have arisen about the scope of the requirement that IDX site operators protect the listings of other participants displayed on their IDX sites from “scraping”. Specifically, whether the policy distinguishes between “malicious” scraping and what might be considered “good” or “benign” scraping. Also, whether “indexing” is a type of scraping. The Center for REALTOR® Technology (”CRT”) advised that while the intent of “scrapers” may be malicious, and the intent of “indexers” good, the two practices from the Web server’s view appear to be the same. Consequently, NAR staff responded to questioners that the requirement to prevent scraping includes indexing.
So, the rub of the issue is that MIBOR punted the ball back to NAR, which asked CRT, and CRT (as a technical body) said, technically, there’s no difference between scraping and indexing. Of course, as is clear from the above Wikipedia definition, CRT is right — there really is no distinction from the perspective of the computer activity between scraping and indexing. Both processes read the web site and do stuff with the data.
However, focusing on the technical process here is wrong. Instead, the important distinction is between the results of the activity. Here is perhaps a compelling explanation of how these two are different. When you go to visit a web site, your web browser reads the web site and displays the information back to you. In fact, most web browsers store a copy of that site on your computer so that it can display it back to you faster if you look at it again later. From a technical perspective, your visit to the web site and your browser caching the content locally on your computer is not very different from what a scraper does.
However, nobody is going to argue that web visitors are scrapers. Why? Because of their intent and what they are doing with the data. A consumer looking at content is a good thing. So, too, I would suggest is Google indexing the web and real estate content. Google is not (at least today) taking the content and presenting it as their own creation. Instead, they are linking back to the source of the data, which provides a critically important service to the web site being indexed. This is what the web is all about and so interpreting indexing and scraping as the same thing results in the leap backward the commenters on the Agent Genius post decry. It’s an undoing of the web for IDX sites, which have become critically important to agents and brokers today.
Before concluding this post, however, I also want to point out that not every one agrees that Google’s indexes are positive or even benign. In Belgium, a court has ruled that Google’s News service violates certain newspapers copyrights. In hailing the opinion, the winner of the case is quoted by the New York Times as saying:
”Today we celebrate a victory for content producers,” said Margaret Boribon, secretary-general of Copiepresse. ”We showed that Google cannot make profit for free from the credibility of our newspaper brands, hard work of our journalists and skill of our photographers.”
Could a similar argument be made by MLSs or listing agents about Google indexing listing data? Possibly. However, I think getting a similar ruling from a US court is unlikely. (Any lawyers out there who know the law on this, please comment to clarify, because I’m definitely no expert here.)
More importantly, our industry has accepted the web as its friend and Google is accepted as a critical part of the web. To many, in fact, Google is the web. What’s wrong with the MIBOR decision and CRT’s narrow, technical interpretation that led to MIBOR’s decision, is that it goes against the many decisions that have already been made that the web is the real estate industry’s friend. That decision cannot be unmade. It’s done. Rule interpretations like that provided by CRT, however, do result in NAR members not being able to compete. As many on Agent Genius have commented, Trulia, Zillow and Realtor.com are not hamstrung by this same interpretation of the IDX policy, which only hinders and restricts NAR’s members. That’s wrong.
Fortunately, we live in a web world and, for many, that means we know each other personally. Most of those commenting over at Agent Genius have met, know and greatly respect Chris McKeever (@crtweet on Twitter), who now heads up CRT. My hope is that Chris can join the conversation and clarify CRT’s interpretation or let us know why the current interpretation is best. I’m asking for this conversation with the greatest respect for Chris and everyone at CRT. MIBOR put them on the hot seat but perhaps there’s a possibility the conversation can result in greater understanding for everyone, and hopefully a quick clarification on this critically important matter for MLS organizations that haven’t yet interpreted the policy on this issue.
This last week we added a new function in flexmls Web to allow users to edit map shapes, name them and change their color. You can click to grab any point and move it to change the shape, and you can click in the center of the shape to drag it to a new position.
You also can name each shape and specify a color to distinguish it from others.
We’re next going to add the ability for users to share shapes with each other, which we think will produce some interesting collaborative opportunities to improve searching, statistics, and CMAs.
Do you think the ability to share shapes will be useful?
Who do you think owns the shape data once it is saved and shared?
Last week at Connection 2009, I listened to a presentation from Dale Ross about NAR’s Real Property Resource (RPR), which previously has been referred to as the Gateway, Channel, Library, etc. Here are a couple of highlights from the presentation:
Those are the highlights I gleaned from the presentation. Here are my thoughts:
In closing, I go back to an earlier post I wrote on this same topic, where I concluded:
What I think would be useful is for NAR to foster a discussion among brokers, agents and MLSs regarding the Open Web and what that means for real estate. This same discussion is occurring right now with regard to the web as a whole, and Brad Neuberg recently suggested: “If we take the long term view, how can we give the web an open enough infrastructure to evolve over time and meet each generations needs, while maintaining its structure enough to actually mean something and stay true to its promise, similar to the U.S. Constitution?” He emphasizes that this isn’t so much about specific technology but rather the general philosophy: “if we define the Open Web in terms of [specific] technologies, then we risk losing sight of what makes the web special and being able to have the intellectual nimbleness to evolve the infrastructure of the web. . . . We will be fighting yesterdays battle while allowing new, proprietary technologies to take over if we focus on technologies rather than philosophy.”
