Keeping with my trend of welcoming new people many weeks after they are new people, I’d like to welcome Ana Schmitz to CRT.
Ana joins us as our new Communications Associate. However, she’s been with NAR for over 10 years, most recently in our marketing dept. We’re happy and lucky to have her with us. In just two weeks she’s already jumped into all of her major job responsibilities as fast as we could throw them at her.
Ana is looking to learn more about technology in general and would like to be a rock-star programmer. For some reason, she thinks she can learn that stuff in CRT. She’s already been doing self-study on Java, and for a project we need done, she’ll be learning PHP. As a welcoming present in our comments, please feel free to leave her other technologies she should look at.
Part of this post is almost two months overdue and I’m also not keeping up with my pledge to blog more often… Anyway…
I’d like to welcome Heather Norton to the NAR staff family. Heather is the new Vice President of Information Technology Services (ITS), CRT’s sibling department. I’m very excited to be working with her. In just the short time she’s been working with us she’s been making some dramatic changes for the better with more on the way. She has an open invitation to add her voice to CRT’s blog and I hope she takes us up on it.
Heather is a people person and has been doing a lot of reading on social trends, getting things done, wisdom of crowds, that sort of thing. In her honor, I share the following link with you: GTD in Space: Seven Habits of Highly Effective Spaceship Captains.
If you want to learn good organization skills, look no further than some of the best leaders in the universe: the captains of spaceships. They may be fictional, but they have skills that translate into the real world. After all, you’d follow Admiral Adama into battle, and trust Malcolm Reynolds to have your back. Now you can learn the seven greatest leadership lessons we gleaned from watching shows like Futurama and Firefly
Generally I don’t like to use the blog for update releases of CRT’s projects, but I think its a good thing to do on the first release of something or if there is a major change. ezRETS 2.1 is such a release.
The major feature of ezRETS 2.1 is official support for Mac OS X. You need to have 10.4.x aka Tiger. However, its a universal binary, so it doesn’t matter if you’re rolling it with Intel or PPC.
As a quick reminder, ezRETS is CRT’s ODBC Driver for RETS servers. It aims to provide read-only access to RETS servers via any application that can speak ODBC, such as Microsoft Office. It’s cross-platform existing under Windows and Linux. For more about it, visit ezRETS project web page.
Continue reading ‘ezRETS new and improved with intense Apple flavor!’
CRT has just released their annual REALTOR Technology Survey. It is available to be viewed at www.realtors.org/crt. Some interest findings are:
• 54 percent of real estate brokers, sales associates, and managers who responded spent more than $1,000 on business-related technology in 2006. Not surprisingly, brokers were the big spenders, with half spending between $2,000 and $3,000 on tech in ’06. Half of all sales associates (agents and associate brokers) spent $501 or more last year. Spending was at approximately the same levels as in last year’s survey.
• 65 percent of respondents have their own business Web site.
• Respondents’ favorite Web sites to display their listings are REALTOR.com, the associate’s personal site, and the company’s site. Those responding found the Internet more valuable than open houses or floor time for generating leads.
• 64 percent communicate with past clients quarterly or more often. Phone and e-mail are the prime tools to stay in touch with active clients. Mailings and market updates top the list of ways to reach former clients.
• 94 percent use a CMA in their listing presentation, mostly relying on CMA software programs furnished by their local MLS. About 35 percent were either somewhat or very dissatisfied with the CMA program available. The ability to personalize design was again the area “needing to be improved the most.�?
• 72 percent used some electronic mapping application for business. The most useful applications for respondents were driving directions and outlined maps of neighborhoods and subdivisions.
• 38 percent of respondents’ companies have a written network security policy for staff, and 43 percent have a written policy for clients and consumers. About one-third of respondents did not know whether their company had written network security policies in place.
Thank Heavens for RSS! CRT is able to stay in touch with the outside world much more efficiently because of it. We wind up IM’ing, emailing, yelling over the cubes to have each other check out something techie, amazing or bizarre. We feel like we are leaving everyone else out of our fun. So starting this week, we will have a Deep Link Recap. These are links that we found informative, thought provoking or maybe even got a little chuckle out of.
- Enjoy
Continue reading ‘Deep Links - May/4/07′
RETS, the Real Estate Transaction Standard, has been in active development for over 8 years signaling the industry’s, as well as the National Association of REALTORS®, vision to simplify data access of Real Estate listing information. Although RETS intended effect on the industry is apparent on many levels, its impact on it has only started. However, over the past 6 months, RETS has seen a major transition in every aspect of its development - ranging from leadership down to the aesthetics of the website. This marks its transition from infancy to adolescence.
Continue reading ‘RETS Renewed’
One's perspective is vastly different looking into a snow globe as opposed to if we were living in the globe looking out. Unfortuntely, in the realm of CRT, we are often found looking into the snow globe and seeing a wonderful world of listings, agents, technology, harmony and bliss. In other words, we don't always appreciate the depth, balance and concerns that the industry faces in the trenches.
To gauge the industry from a technological perspective, we are going to open our inboxes up for questions, comments, insights and stories. We have created AskATech@crt.realtors.org. Dependant on the traffic, we will try to answer questions and provide comment, but more importantly, we will use this feedback to help push the CRT Blog in a 'Dear Abby' fashion.
No question is too small, and hopefully no question is too hard. gulp! So please feel free to start sending in your technology related questions, we are looking forward to hearing from you.
Why was I talking snow, I probably just jinxed Chicago for a brutal weather - Snake is going to be mad.
Our blog has been kinda quiet lately and for that I apologize. I plan on making sure that changes and we’re back to the regularly active blog you’ve come to love. On to the topic at hand…
Traditionally, spring is the time of renewal and rebirth, but CRT has never been one to follow some conventions. While we’ve been quiet, CRT has been in the process of what we’ve affectionately called rebooting.
5 years ago this past August, CRT was created. In the beginning CRT was just two people: Mark Lesswing and myself. Over time we added staff. As we hit our five year anniversary, Mark was promoted to NAR’s CTO. I was then asked to head up CRT and I accepted the challenge. At first, due to various staffing changes, CRT was back down to two people: myself and Ian Smith. Luckily this has changed. Continue reading ‘[root@crt ~]# shutdown -r now’
Update - PolicyPage v1.1.0 is now available.
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PolicyPage v1.1.0 beta announced.
PolicyPage now contains site ‘spidering ‘as a part of the application.
CRT is looking for PolicyPage users interested in installing the PolicyPage v 1.1.0 (beta).
CRT has expanded PolicyPage’s utility by adding a spidering application to the program. This spidering feature uses a Web crawler to browse the entire member Web site selected by PolicyPage. It then follows links on the site and applies PolicyPage rules to the pages it encounters. The new spider feature also allows users to omit certain pages (such as the "contact me" and "about" pages) from a compliance check.
CRT developed PolicyPage as a tool for MLSs to review member Web sites for compliance with listing display policies. PolicyPage simplifies and speeds up site review by scanning for required terminology and graphics on participants’ Web sites. The software provides objective standards for evaluating Web sites and can be tailored to local needs.
The spider feature is available in PolicyPage release 1.1.0 (beta) starting August 25, 2006. This release is recommended for new users who want to use the spidering feature. The production release will be available in early September. If you are interested in working with the beta release please contact CRT.
Last night Mark received a special Inman Innovator Award for "Individual Innovator " at the Inman Connect real estate conference in San Francisco. The award honors forward-thinking technology pioneers in online real estate, brokerage and mortgage companies
Congratulations Mark!
