Arthur Richards has written a Drupal plugin for RETS! This allows you to create a website that has listing information taken directly from the MLS. You can find it with other Drupal plug-ins.
Here is a clip of what Arthur posted on the VieleRETS mailing list about the plug-in:
I could use a lot of help testing this, and if anyone knows
PHP/MySQL/has experience working with Drupal modules, please help make
this better and get it to a point of stability!
Let me know if you're interested at all in testing/coding.
There has been talk about RETS as a Wordpress plug-in too!
The 2008 CRT Technology Survey is here and ready to be taken by REALTORS®. Take the survey, and pass it on to other REALTORS® if you wish. It will remain open through July 15, 2008. One lucky respondent will be selected to win an iPod Touch.
This survey is typically sent out earlier in the year, but due to being one staff-member short during 1st quarter 2008, we’re trying to catch up now. The survey report will be available later this year at www.realtors.org/crt. I’ll make sure to alert everyone once the report is available. Stay tuned!
My embarrassing blunder….Just as I got ready to celebrate the deployment of this survey - It was brought to my attention that my U.S. state list was incomplete. (BLUSH!)
Dear REALTOR® friends in Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia, Please accept my apology for the oversight. Fortunately, LimeSurvey - the survey tool CRT uses - allowed me to go in and add these missing states. (Whew! And, thanks to the person who made us aware of this unintentional omission.)
CRT looks forward to learning about your technology usage & needs. If you have a few minutes, take the survey and let your voice be heard!
Despite having a name very similar to CRT’s, the Center for Real Estate and Social Technologies (CREST) aims to be “the definitive research and education resource for social technologies in the real estate business, conducting surveys and other projects to generate benchmarks and best practices that REALTORS® can employ to improve their social networking, blogging, and social media marketing efforts.” To attain that goal, CREST announced themselves and launched their first survey over on VARbuzz yesterday.
If you’re a REALTOR® who write and maintains your own blog, the first survey is aimed at you. Why don’t you toss them some answers?
Or in other words - Some clarification on the recent NAR/DOJ settlement…..
There has recently been various blogs, comments and observations that have created some uncertainty regarding the requirements and obligations imposed on MLSs and brokers who operate websites under the recently announced settlement of the lawsuit brought by the U.S. Department of Justice against NAR relating to NAR’s VOW policy. As part of CRT’s mission, we will continue to help clarify and navigate through this questions as much as we can.
Below are some clarifications from Ralph Holmen, Associate General Counsel for NAR. Hopefully this can be a first step in clarifying the nature of the settlement and address issues raised by it.
Continue reading ‘WASSUP WIT DAT DOJ?’
REALTOR® Confidential: Episode 3 is in the final editing process. In this episode we will talk with IT professionals and find out what they think about technology plus get some helpful tips. Keep an eye on the REALTOR® Confidential blog for the next installment and remember to send us your tech tips. Video, audio and even that old twentieth century tech, text, is welcome.
In my reading this morning, Chicagoist had a post which alerted me to Wordle. We’ve been using word clouds in some of the flyers we’ve been making lately. (And by we, I mean Ana and her excellent work.) Wordle is a quick and effortless way to make clouds that you are then free to do anything you like with.
For some geeky fun, I took the C++ source code (and header file) to librets::RetsSession from the libRETS source code, and generated a could. Who woulda that that in C/C++ return was the most recurring word? Okay, yeah, EVERYBODY. Click on the image for a larger view.
So, I stumbled across the Google Chat Badge. It’ll let any user to your site, blog, etc chat with you if you are online. Best part is, they don’t need to have a Google Chat account. Could come in handy for visitors checking out a listing, see you online and ask a quick question.
PS - it looks like it even respects when you set your status to ‘BUSY’. SCHWEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEET!
