CRT’s communications
Mark and I did a quick tour of the Expo show floor this afternoon. Lots of big new booths. To me, its a reflection of the real estate market over the past several years. Not only has it contributed to REALTORS’ success but a lot of vendors have share in the rewards too. No burst bubble on this floor.
And two years ago here I saw a car on the expo floor, liked it and ended up buying one. This year in our walk I saw a Mustang, Hummer and Ferrari. Well…
CRT’s first technology session was held today. It was Internet Lead Cultivation. How do I turn consumers that are browsing my web site into someone who will list or buy through me. The attendance at this session was phenomenal. The room held 400 and was maxed out. the ushers barred anymore people from entering and there were at least 50+ standing at the door waiting to get in. Mark and I left to provide room for two more REALTORS to attend.
Word to the wise - if you see another session that you want - GET THERE EARLY.
More and more real estate technology vendors are using apps from CRT. In fact we’ve heard from several who have imbedded CRT in their own products. Today NAR Public Affairs issued a press release on the subject. We take our hats off to Mark Wise and Threewide for participating in the release with us.
CRT and the REALTOR Secure program have published new series of Information Security Executive Briefs. These real estate focused briefs are high-level review of important aspects of IT security. They can be used to educate a real estate board or committee.
Information Security Management Principles – provides insights into security decision making, planning, and budgeting.
Information Security Key Concepts – presents an overview of key security principles of confidentiality, integrity, and availability.
Information Security Decision Insight – delivers ideas on how to review, access, and document your security.
Information Security Regulatory Overview – focuses on current security legislation and regulation and a forecast of future legal trends.
CRT has also published a white paper on how to get started on the road to better technology security. Information Security - An Executives Guide to Getting Started provides information you need to begin your security assessment, remediation, and monitoring processes. CynergisTek, a leading IT security firm that participates in the REALTOR Secure program, collaborated with CRT on the executive briefs and white papers.
In addition to the CRT briefs, we posted on our site a primer on business continuity that was contributed by Clareity Consulting.
PolicyPage is a new application from CRT. PolicyPage allows for active enforcement of display policies by MLSs.
PolicyPage grew out conference earlier this year. MLS executives said they were facing challenges policing member web sites. Some were not enforcing policies, other complained they needed additional resources and yet others complained on inconsistent enforcement. Several they were going to hire to review web sites. As a part of CRTs advocacy and implementation missions PolicyPage was born.
At the 2005 REALTORS Convention & Expo in San Francisco this week, CRT held the first PolicyPage project meeting. There were 13 MLSs in attendance that see policing sites as an issue and want to get involved.
All were agreed with the concept of Policy Page and what it will do. In fact most attendees want the spidering feature, that we’re adding next year, right away.
Another consistent issue was the ‘placement’ of information on a screen. What can be placed where and the need to prevent intermingling of listing data and web site host’s contact information. Other valuable input was gained from the MLSs in attendance and several PolicyPage beta projects will start next month.
If you are interested in participating - join the PolicyPage project list.
Remember PolicyPage is a tool that can help move toward greater display policy compliance. It is not the total solution . Boards and MLSs will also need to step up to correct the issues that PolicyPage identifies.
CRT is Chicago based. In the past couple of weeks, we too got caught up in the excitement of the 2005 White Sox. They were fun and it was entertaining to watch Ozzie ball. We congratulate them and their die hard fans including Aubrey and my Dad.
The 2005 White Sox also taught some simple lessons:
- be a team player
- contribute what you can
- enjoy what you are doing
- keep on swinging.
With NAR’s annual convention this week, some of you may be asking “Wasn’t there a blog about last year’s convention that CRT ran, and wasn’t it still up just a few weeks ago?”
The answer to both questions would be yes.
This year, CRT decided not to sponsor and/or run a blog about annual. We felt that it would have been a redundant resource since folks like the Real Estate Blog Squad will be covering the annual convention in depth. Our members know more of what they want to see and what their takes are on those items than us, so they are certainly the best people to cover it. I’ve already got REBS in my RSS reader, now I’ll just need to make some time while I’m in San Francisco to sit down and read it!
Just as a warning: this doesn’t mean there won’t be any tidbits from us about annual on this blog, though.
See you there!
At this time we have 5 departmental servers. Last January I rebuilt 3 of the 5. As long as I was doing this rebuild, I thought I’d try to make the boxes as similar as possible to reduce administration overhead. The three boxes serve very different needs, but their core installs are exactly the same.
All of our servers are Linux based and have been since day one. For our Linux distribution we’ve always used some version of RedHat Linux. In 2003, RedHat announced that they were going to change how they do their releases. They were going to focus on their enterprise version, so they spun off their general distribution into Fedora Core, most commonly known as Fedora or the initials FC. Fedora had the goal to be mostly community driven and supported. The downside to Fedora is that it would have a new major version every 6 months or so and only the current and last versions were going to be generally supported. For servers, having “official” support for only 6 months to a year doesn’t make me feel good. In contrast, RedHat’s enterprise (RHEL) version has a support life of 5 years.
Because RedHat’s enterprise distribution and all of their installing tools are open source and available by RedHat (to comply with the GPL, among other licenses) a few people have taken the source and built it into a RHEL compatible Linux distribution. All of our servers are currently clones of RHEL3. At first we were using White Box Enterprise Linux which is built and supported by one or two people. That worked well, but I felt that only having one or two people supporting that distribution would slow down security updates and the like. When RHEL4 came out, White Box ended up being way behind the curve. As I was looking to an RHEL4 clone for home, I came across the The Community ENTerprise Operating System aka CentOS project. Like White Box, this is a RHEL clone, but they have more of a community behind the project, and they do RHEL4 as well as RHEL3. Since White Box and CentOS are both clones of RHEL3, it was easy to migrate from getting security and app updates from one to the other.
At this point, RHEL3 is getting a bit long in the tooth and some of the packages, particularly MySQL, are vastly out of date. The servers that are on RHEL3 will still be on it until there is a compeling reason to upgrade or until we hit Aug 2010, which should be its support end of life. However, any new servers that we would need to setup would be RHEL4 or one of its clones.
I was at the MTC Technology Forum and I was asked if CRT would be interested in taking up a data integrity project for MLS. Similar requests were made over the summer from a couple of MLS organizations in states too.
Basically, the project would apply rules to incoming listings as a quality assurance process. Listings that fail the test would have their owners notified. The processing from this standpoint is similar to that of the PolicyPage project.
CRT had worked on a project we called “Hercules” two years ago, but we never released the project. Hercules performed “Broker Load”.
If there is interest in a new project that uses rules (PolicyPage) to perform a Quality Assurance step on uploaded listings (Hercules), please let us know.
CRT staff gets invited to speak at many venues. This past week I was privileged to be at the Colorado Association of REALTORS state convention. The Colorado association has a large population of REALTORS with over 26,000 members. This was also one of the largest state meetings I’ve attended with over 2,300 attendees.
The first day included a talk on information security that was well attended. After doing many of these over the past months and years, it’s encouraging to see the attendance at these sessions continue to rise. More and more REALTORS have come to realize the importance of protecting themselves, their customers, and their business information from breaches and other information security threats. We at CRT will continue to advocate on this important topic. One of the items we brought to the convention and used in several sessions were our new Executive Briefs that highlight aspects of information security. We also displayed a couple of the new CRT videos on security. The audience particularly liked the one on financial safeguards. It’s entertaining but also gets the message across.
One of my favorite parts of a convention is the expo floor and visiting with old and new exhibitors. It always great to see some familiar faces like Everett Kaneshige from Pocket Real Estate and James Reynolds from SentriLock. And then there are the new vendors that we come across. One area that CRT has started to investigate is the use of videos to market real estate. That’s why you’ll see CRT using videos in some of our CRT projects as an example and to understand the concepts and expense involved. One of the new vendors I met at the CAR expo was imagination interactive or I2. They are now marketing the use of videos to display and sell a property. I was impressed with what I saw. Vendors like I2 can bring new ideas to the industry that many REALTORS will find useful as well as something they’ll be using in a short time.
On Tuesday evening I got to attend the the CAR Inaugural Dinner. What a polished affair - Bob Golden and his staff now how to do it right. I was lucky enough to get the sit at a table with a group from ERA Shields. It was a lively group and rightly so. ERA Shields is where the incoming 2006 CAR President Michael Labout is from. ERA Shields is a local Colorado Springs based firm and it was a great opportunity to learn about the area. I tip my hat to Lois and Mary from ERA Shields for providing me with great conversation and their insight on Colorado Springs and the local market. We also had a lot of laughs.
And now a quick digression - earlier in the day, I was looking for someone from CAR to get some help - I must have looked lost, or certainly out of place. A gentleman came up and asked if I needed any assistance. I explained my situation, the gentleman walked me to the right person, introduced me, and in seconds all issues were resolved. Well, I didn’t know it until I got to dinner that night, that the gentleman who helped me was the incoming President himself - Michael Labout. No wonder, with a helping attitude like that, he’s a successful REALTOR and the 2006 CAR President.
Had an enlightening lunch with Kati Harken, the Chair of CAR’s Technology Committee and Jeff Geddes, CAR’s Director of Technology covering many facets of technology. I then presented to the CAR Technology Committee. I gave an overview of CRT, our mission and applications and then specifically reviewed some of our projects like PolicyPage, Messenger and REALTOR Secure. This was a sharp group with good questions, always looking for ways to improve the real estate ‘process’ for both the REALTOR and consumer.
The location of the convention was the Broadmoor Hotel. This is a beautiful, full-amenity, luxury property with with personnel and service that make a guest feel cared for. I wish I could have enjoyed more of the recreational aspects of the hotel. Add to that the the mountain scenery in full fall color, the view from my room was beautiful, and the exquisite weather - CRT would be pleased to be invited back.
