The NAR Midyear Legislative Meetings & Trade Expo took place last week in Washington DC. This is one of the best NAR meeting because of the number of attendees and the focus of the events. Besides the business of running NAR and a great trade expo, REALTORS get the opportunity to meet with elected officials and put forth the REALTORS’ agenda on capital hill.
One item that received prominent attention at the Midyear meeting is security. It was a part of many topics as well as having it own session.
First the National Association of REALTORS and the Federal Trade Commission have formed a partnership to prevent identity theft. The program, “Deter, Detect and Defend ,” aims to educate consumers, particularly home buyers, about the devastating effects of identity theft and help them protect themselves against it.
RETS 2.0 was officially announced as a release candidate at the meeting. The Real Estate Transaction Standard (RETS) Version 2 Web Service addresses a need in the industry to use open standards to exchange information, improve tool support, lower development costs and improve security, while accommodating new technological developments, like transaction management. RETS is the open standard for exchanging real estate transaction information and is being implemented by many real estate industry leaders in their next generation of real estate information systems.
There was a security session focused on how security can be an enabling technology and how REALTOR Secure can be used to achieve more efficient and effective operations. The session was hosted by Mac McMillan the CEO of Cynergistek and ourselves. While focusing on overall security, we also looked at how REALTORS can protect themselves and mentioned some of the upcoming REALTOR Secure efforts you’ll see this summer.
It was also announced during the conference that Instanet Solutions received the REALTOR Secure certification for it use of information security bet practices .
The trade show floor included security with vendors Clareity and RSA Security participating. During the Midyear meeting RSA released a real estate security survey that highlight how segments of the industry hold different opinions regarding information security and the steps needed to improve it. The survey also shows differences of opinion regarding who should be responsible for the security of real estate data.
Lastly, the Business Technology & Information Systems Forum featured a lively discussion on tokens used in real estate and featured panelists from Clareity, RSA, Secure Computing and Rapattoni. The session covered MLS access controls and techniques that different firms use. This session was an old fashion shoot out with the vendors ‘explaining’ why their technologies and methods were better than the others.
While much work remains, the focus on information security in the industry is encouraging.
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