Archive for the 'Internet' Category

Is it a sine?

Published
by
Chris McKeever
on May 15, 2008
in Articles, Internet, MLS, Projects, Standards and Tools
. 4 Comments

A few years back, I watched MLSNI turn off their consumer facing website because members took the stance that this was reducing broker/agent centric website exposure. Ironically, seemingly overnight, this almost perfectly coincided with the flash flood of Syndication Portals (Trulia, Zillow, GoogleBase, etc).

At first, the industry was very apprehensive to giving their listings away for free. Over time they eased up, and saw how they can leverage these advertising vehicles. In all essence, they are just a more refined online classifieds model (such as the newspapers, but focused). More and more of these advertising sites began to appear, somewhat diluting the benefits, increasing the work for exposure (see Andrews Syndication Article to battle this issue) and calling more attention to what was really going on. These sites were filling a critical void in the consumer marketplace.

Continue reading ‘Is it a sine?’

We Cannot Allow Ourselves To Have a Syndication Tool Gap!

Published
by
Andrew Tillman
on May 12, 2008
in Internet, Introspection and Tools
. 0 Comments

George C. ScottAll the RETS buzz these days seems to be about the new RESO Syndication standard. It promises to make the lives of syndicators (Google, Zillow, Yahoo, Trulia etc), aggregators (ThreeWide, Point2), brokers and even MLSs easier.  With a common data format to use, the workload of everyone will go down significantly.  But right now there is one actor in that list that will be left with a syndication tool gap; the broker.  What is needed is a simple easy to use tool that can allow the broker to create a syndication file reliably, even if they don’t have their own listing database.

Syndicators, aggregators and MLSs are all technology companies that already share data online with various parties.  Moving to a new common standard is fairly easy and once done will help improve their efficiency.  However, many brokers are small operations with little or no IT staff.  What they need is a tool that can run without a database, on a desktop machine. It needs to be able to read from a RETS source, and output a syndication file.  That file can then be uploaded to a syndicator or aggregator, or put up on a web site to be pulled down by same.  At the April RETS meeting in Philadelphia I demoed a proof of concept tool at the RETS Exhibition that did just that, called the RETS Proxy (I even won a prize!).  While this tool is not ready to fill the tool gap, the design I showed has serious limitations, it is basically that idea that I am going for.

With such a tool, brokers can make effective use of the standard.  We at CRT will look into filling this tool gap, I for one plan on taking my proof of concept and expanding it to fill the above requirement.  We also look forward to others stepping up, maybe filling in the gaps that we missed.  The more tools the broker has, the easier it will be for them to use the standard; a standard that would be useless without their data.

Net Neutrality (what, again?)

Published
by
Mark Lesswing
on March 12, 2008
in General and Internet
. 0 Comments


Save the Internet

I was turned on to this video by Doug Whitehouse, a member of the NAR Business Issues Committee. I liked the production, use of medium and of course, the cause. This is one of my favorite committees and I’m not really bult for committee work

NAR has been active on technology issues like this, on behalf of members, through the Government Affairs division.

NAR has no affiliation with the group behind this video, I just thought it was educational.

Update: You can also find it on YouTube

I’m a tweeter, he’s a tweeter, don’t you want to be a tweeter too?

Published
by
Heather Norton
on March 6, 2008
in Geek, Internet and Tools
. 3 Comments

While at the Technology Directors conference here in Atlanta, GA I was asked by a few people in short order, what the value is in using twitter. If you don’t know what twitter is, in a feat of amazingly good timing the commoncraft.com team has come out with Twitter in Plain English, which does a great job of explaining the social aspects of the tool.

However, as Keith pointed out in his introductory post, I am a passionate about not only social media, but about lifehacking and Getting Things Done, so I use twitter in a outside-of-the-box way to make my life more productive, and I’ll share some of those ways with you below the jump. Continue reading ‘I’m a tweeter, he’s a tweeter, don’t you want to be a tweeter too?’

Culture 2.0: the end of Arrogance

Published
by
Mark Lesswing
on March 5, 2008
in Geek, General, Internet and Programming
. 1 Comment

hitchcock_silouetteJust a link to an article that made me think about how the business may change over the next couple of years.

When I speak about business models, I present those that are known and already in the field. One of the questions I get asked is “How will the business models change in the future?”. Putting my finger on how the next generation of REALTORS will engage had been difficult. I recently came to the “collaboration” thought and have been using it on the road for a couple of months. This article gave a reason to believe I should continue these thoughts.

Although microtrends are characterized as having Personas, they can also be used in a good way. Personas should be used to model Culture 1.0 and Culture 2.0 users because they have nothing to do with the Real Estate model being used by the software user.

OK, this sounds clumsy so far. Here is an example of what I mean. Note that persona is used in two different contexts:

Persona #1 - Culture 1.0

Campaign marketing tool that sends out messages and tries to categorize responses into one of 4 pre-planned sub-campaigns. Typically these are built with “tree logic” (if response #5 is ‘yes’ then ….). Each sub-campaign is designed to meet the needs of a “persona”.

Persona #2 - Culture 2.0

Organic marketing tool that uses content to attract attention, then tries to determine the intention of the consumer. Intention is another word for collaboration in this context.

Maybe its time to look again…

Published
by
Keith Garner
on February 8, 2008
in Internet
. 4 Comments

openid.pngOne of the big buzzwords going around for the past year has been Single Sign-On, or SSO. Its been making its presence felt so hard that CRT felt we should help sponsor and provide hosting for open source implementation of one flavor of it, even if we weren’t going to contribute any code.

The ‘one flavor’ I mention above is going down the path of using the SAML standard. SAML is an OASIS standard with some work contributed by the Liberty Alliance. For some reason, within the Real Estate community, SAML has caught on THE WAY TO DO IT. You can see working implantations of SAML in real estate used by CAR, Rapattoni, and Clareity Security. However, like anything related to technology There Is More Than One Way To Do ItTM.

Recently, the OpenID Foundation announced that Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign, and Yahoo! have joined their board. That’s a lot of big weight going with OpenID. Many of those companies already accept OpenID as a form of authentication or are OpenID providers themselves. Yahoo! is a prime example of a large OpenID provider. It seems like momentum is certainly gaining on OpenID, which is pretty impressive for something that just started in 2005. (In full disclosure, it should be noted that CRT had David Recordon from the OpenID and SixApart as a panel member at the last NAR Annual convention.)

In looking at OpenID’s web site I found a quote from Brad Fitzpatrick, the father of OpenID, to a philosophy I really like and I think is important for a shared resource this like:

Nobody should own this. Nobody’s planning on making any money from this. The goal is to release every part of this under the most liberal licenses possible, so there’s no money or licensing or registering required to play. It benefits the community as a whole if something like this exists, and we’re all a part of the community.

Obviously, a lot of this follows CRT’s general open-source philosophy which I’ve alwasy been a big fan of. However, I think this contrasts with some of what we see in our market. This is something I’ve been hearing saying we all need, that its not a competitive advantage.

In any case, given the philosophy behind it and where we need to go in real estate, I think its time to give OpenID another look, especially given the added weight it received this week.

No matter the technology the future is an exciting place. Imagine using your MLS id as a your way to get onto realtor.org. Or maybe NAR is the ID provider that allows you to access your MLS, gmail account, and your favorite blog?

(Just a quick final note: It should be noted that just because you have can share a common piece of authentication, it doesn’t mean a user of that authentication system will allow full access to anyone. There is still authorization levels at each site. This is the same between both models discussed here.)

Got Listings - Will Syndicate!

Published
by
Chris McKeever
on February 4, 2008
in Internet and Standards
. 1 Comment

tiger.jpg

CRT has discussed the increasing presence of listing aggregators here at the blog, during speaking events and pretty much whenever someone asks us about marketing their listings. They are filling a niche/void for online marketing and property search. The space is getting so competitive that it seems a new site comes around with a great twist on the typical listing search delivery every week - case in point, Roost entered the game quietly less than two weeks ago and already has heads turning.

With all these places to toss your listings, it gets painful to manually add your inventory. Some have automated process, but for the average agent, or broker, that requires outsourcing some work, constantly getting updates and fixes when formats change. You have to start to ask yourself, if all the information I pass around is the same - why do I need to reinvent the wheel every time I pass it?

Well, the larger players in the consumer listing search space began to wonder this as well, and proposed to work together. They also have given the RETS community an opportunity to work with them in defining what this looks like. With the new formed relationship and commitment to move this initiative forward, the RETS Board charted the Syndication Workgroup.

This is great news, as there has always been a large amount of debate over the relatively simpler methods to get listing data to these third party sites, versus the more robust methods to get listing data from an MLS. This new effort could be the missing link that provides brokers and agents with a simple and effective method of both getting data from an MLS as well as publishing it to third party sites for use in advertising.

Last summer Keith discussed a simple method for listing distribution. Taking that, and moving it one step further, we decided to create a first run concept of an easy to implement, easy to use listing syndication specification.

Continue reading ‘Got Listings - Will Syndicate!’

Carpe Datum

Published
by
Andrew Tillman
on January 10, 2008
in Articles, Internet and MLS
. 9 Comments

The new year is here and already it has brought about huge changes! Earlier this month, RESO Chair Michael Wurzer wrote an open letter to Yahoo!, Google, Trulia and Zillow to get them to support RETS as a common data standard for everyone in the industry. I was going write about this topic anyway but a recent press release makes it even more relevant. Today, Yahoo!, Google, Trulia and Zillow as well as several other aggregators have all agreed to work with RESO to adopt common data standards to make it possible for brokers to send a single listings feed to multiple web sites.

This is a big win and opportunity for RETS. With the influx of a large amount of new blood into RESO, The RETS schema has the potential to grow into THE data standard for real estate data sharing. But I also see a danger here for RETS. If the RESO and the RETS community does not seize on this opportunity and run with it, these companies will work together and create something else. The reason they are all willing to work together on this is because there it a huge need, and if RETS is unable to fill that need, something else will. So, lets hope that RESO and the RET community see this opportunity seize the data!

Where’s Santa?

Published
by
Keith Garner
on December 24, 2007
in Internet
. 3 Comments

reindeerevan.jpgGone are the days of radio updates of where Santa is, now we can get REAL-TIME on your fat-man tracking.

First, you can visit NORAD’s web site for tracking Santa that is in 5 languages and features a map that updates every few minutes. Second, they have a link to a kml file for Google Earth so you can track Santa in 3D. I had fun with my daughter this morning showing her the difference of where we are vs where Santa is right now using Google Earth.

Not following Santa, but fun just the same… For those of us around Chicago, if you’re jonesing for some Holiday lights check out Chicagoloand Christmas Lights. Its main feature is a color coded Google map of 216+ well decorated houses around the Chicago area.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from everyone at CRT!

Your way, isn’t always the best way…

Published
by
Chris McKeever
on December 18, 2007
in Internet and MLS
. 3 Comments

burgerkinglogo.jpg

First, Thank you all for voting for my previous blog post in the Bloodhound Blog People Choice’s. That was a nice little treat to learn about over the weekend! Now onto your regularly scheduled programming.

As the person that is conceptualizing an application, you may be so close to it, that you start to get tunnel vision. Often times there are sleaker, better, more appropriate choices that just go unconsidered because of this. This concept is probably better visualized than explained.

The example also spurred the idea of the post - so its real world, and not Jedi Sorcery.

Continue reading ‘Your way, isn’t always the best way…’

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