I was asked to be on a panel at Inman’s Real Estate Connect this week in New York. Here’s the blurb from the Inman site.

Thursday, January 8, 3:50 pm – 4:35 pm MLS 2014: 5 things to do right now to get ready. Top visionaries share the 5 things you must be aware of to best position your MLS for the next 5 years. Moderated by Victor Lund, Partner, WAV Group. Panelists: Joshua Sharfman, CTO, California Association of Realtors®; Saul Klein, President & CEO, Internet Crusade / CEO, Point2 Technologies; Brian Larson, Attorney at Law, Larson/Sobotka PLLC; Mark Lesswing, Sr. Vice President & Chief Technology Officer, NAR.

I’m going to talk about three things that I recommend MLSs do starting immediately, one from each of three categories: (a) things I think MLSs can and will do; (b) things I think MLSs should but won’t do; and (c) things it may even be unreasonable for me to suggest that they do. See if you can guess which is which.

1. Help the industry state and develop its value proposition. Real estate brokers are not valuable because they have the best or most listing data (though there would be nothing wrong with them having the best and most); they are valuable because they exercise professional judgment. That is to say—given data, information, knowledge, whatever you want to call it, they apply their experience to any given circumstance to make a professional judgment. Addressing this value proposition question does not require the MLS to add new systems (though other objectives might support new systems ideas). To address this issue, MLS needs to (a) help consumers understand the value of professional judgment; (b) help brokers and consumers distinguish among the brokers who have it and the brokers who do not; and (c) structure learning opportunities to help brokers develop it where they lack it.

Part (a) probably means a public relations campaign, unlike the NAR one, which appears to cast real estate brokers as personal assistants (“While Bill is picking up his kids at school, his REALTOR was ordering title work on his listing.”), or worse, just encourages consumers to transact (“Now is a great time to buy a home.”) These programs do not tell consumers what it is brokers can do that the consumers cannot do for themselves. Unfortunately, Part (b) is very difficult…. Discussions about MLSs operating “agent rating” services that consumers and other brokers can use to evaluate the professional competence of brokers will be tricky, at best. And I’m not sure that’s the way to achieve the objective. Part (c) may be beyond the current competence of most MLSs and associations. We know from professions like medicine, law, teaching, etc. that professional judgment can be taught—but the pedagogies that are effective for doing so are missing in the real estate industry.

2. Encourage virtual brokerage among traditional brokers. The settlement of the NAR/DOJ lawsuit means that we now have the rules of the road regarding virtual brokerage (though much remains to be settled in practice). MLSs were worried about VOWs in the early years of this decade because of unknowns and because some of the most visible users of them were “new model” or “no model” firms, who appeared merely to be capitalizing on the MLS listings of other brokers. Rather than continuing to look for ways to limit and discourage VOWs, MLSs should be providing the raw materials for traditional brokers to build on the success of IDX using VOW capabilities, taking advantage of advanced customer relationship management capabilities, lead and referral management tools, and creative co-marketing opportunities.

This means MLSs and the brokers on their boards of directors should not be looking for every possible means to limit what they will deliver to VOW-operating brokers under NAR’s new VOW policy. They should be looking for ways to make it possible for broker web sites to provide a superb customer service relationship to consumers, combining aspects of IDX and VOWs.

3. Measure. MLSs need to make decisions based on data, not on vague perceptions and impressions. A lot of MLSs and associations fail to perform adequate business planning, partly because they do not understand the quantitative relationship of the MLS to the real estate market or measure the parameters they say they intend to change.

First, the MLS needs to understand its role and impact on the market in specific financial terms, not just in ‘feel-good’ terms. How many transactions did the MLS process last year? What dollar volume did that amount to? What approximate amount of commissions was paid to MLS participants on that volume? How much cooperative compensation was paid between MLS participants? How does the MLS and association budget relate to that total of facilitated commission payments? Too many members of MLS boards of directors cannot answer these questions about their organizations.

Second, MLSs should measure before, during, and after the launch of business ventures. Examples include core services like public-facing MLS web sites, showing scheduling services, etc. These may or may not be good choices for business activities, but the only way to find out is to measure the market. Doing so is expensive; if your MLS cannot afford it, join forces with others so you can, or doom yourself to making decisions ‘in the dark.’

Third, MLSs must view data not collected with their interests and interests of their brokers in mind with skepticism. Those pushing certain programs will often provide only measurements that confirm their views; decision-makers must think critically about the data they are reviewing.

Of course, doing just these three things will not make MLSs successful and relevant. They must still attend to the myriad other details of running a business. But these steps would position MLSs to function better as strategic partners to the brokerage community. What’s not to like about that?

As of January 1st, fellow Geek Estate contributor Mike Price is now the social media manager for Diverse Solutions. From my understanding, he’ll still be running MLBroadcast, but will spend a bit less time on it. Or just work a lot more.

This hire makes complete sense for both Mike and the Diverse Solutions team from my perspective. Mike gets to use his existing network of contacts and social media expertise to further Diverse Solutions position as an innovative real estate technology provider and attract new clients. I’m pretty sure Mike already thinks the DS IDX product is top notch, so it’s not as if working for them is the only reason he’ll be endorsing the product. Diverse Solutions gets a well respected spokesman in the RE.net who knows the players and can help navigate the waters. I don’t know whether or not there are plans to integrate video from MLBroadcast into the Diverse Solutions IDX product, but it seems there might be an opportunity down the road to add video components to listing pages.

Even without a dedicated social media manager, Diverse Solutions is certainly doing something right — whenever the subject of IDX providers comes up with agents or brokers I talk to, I usually always mention them. Part of this is due to the fact that Jay Thompson and Kris Berg, both of whom I trust, are customers of Diverse Solutions and have had nothing but good things to say about them. Part of the reason is also that Diverse Solutions is a Zillow API partner, so I’ve spent time talking with Andrew Mattie (also a Geek Estate contributor) and spoken with Justin LaJoie at a few conferences over the past two years. But lastly, the biggest reason is that they have a great product, which makes it a lot easier to endorse them.

It seems real estate technology providers are realizing building bridges with potential clients using social media is a massive opportunity. It’ll be interesting to see whether any of the larger tech vendors such as z57, BIRDVIEW Technologies, Agent Image, or Advanced Access follow the Diverse Solutions lead and try their hand with social media managers of their own.

Congratulations to Mike for finding a great employer, and to Diverse Solutions for a fantastic hire. And it just goes to show, if you want a job in the real estate industry, you should really start blogging.

Are you looking for cost effective ways to grow your business in 2009? Tired of spending tons of money on print advertising? Here are 5 tools to consider adding to your world to help you grow your business.

1. Twitter - a great way to create conversations with like minded people. Don’t push your products and services, just get involved and the business will come.

2. Online Video - the best way to let your website visitors learn more about you. People are lazy and are not reading everything that you have on your website. Post some video. Let them watch and listen to who you are and what your passionate about.

3. Blog - excellent for search engine results, but even better to showcase your knowledge about your business and expertise. Ties in well with online video and Twitter works as an excellent way to promote your posts.

4. Meetup - find groups of like minded people that meetup in real life. If you can’t find a group that is near you or that interests you - start one. (ex. home renovation meetup)

5. Facebook - at the very least get an account, fill in your information, add your profile picture. Ideally you do more with it but getting on is a good start. You will be surprised at how many people find you through it.

–
For more information about me - find me on Facebook or follow me on Twitter. If you’re in Vancouver you can pop by our Real Estate Technology Meetup or perhaps our Young Professionals Meetup. If you care to read more about what I’m thinking you can see my blog here and here. Want video? You can watch some here.
–

See what I mean? For those that don’t know me the above paragraph gives you a pretty good idea about who I am, what I do, where I live, etc. Try it out for yourself. Let me know if you have questions as I would be pleased to help you get setup.

I don’t know about you, but I’d love 2009 to be the year that a “techmeme for real estate” was unveiled. Do you think my wish will be granted?

It’s been a fairly holiday week in the RE.net, but here are a few posts worth taking a look at:

• No Links? Why Blog-Social Networking is Marketing Too!
• My 2008 Blogging Revelation: Blogging to Consumers Opened My Eyes
• Guest Post: Happy Holidays, Mercenaries! Love, The Idealists
• The Case For Paid Reviews
• Top 10 Reputation Tracking Tools Worth Paying For
• How to Add Social Media to Your Blog or Website: Google Friend Connect

Here’s a few geeky links I thought others might enjoy:

• TomTom Enters Online Mapping
• fizber.com Partners With condo.com
• How to Create Your Own Search Engines for Your Blog or Website
• SEO Efforts Measured and Directed
• New dsSearchAgent Features - Zillow Co-Branding

I had the chance to send Myron Lo, ZipRealty’s Director of Product Strategy, a few questions to learn more about the thought process behind their latest release adding Realius community estimating technology to their listing detail pages. Below are my questions and his responses:

Q: What lessons did you learn from your initial integration on a sub domain?

A: After our initial launch on the sub-domain site, we learned that the prediction game was becoming a great tool for our customers to educate themselves on the real estate market. Often times, in the process of predicting home prices, customers would actually find a home they were interested in buying.

Another big discovery for us was that the ZIP community price predictions were becoming great predictors of what homes would actually sell for (in many instances). This revelation supported our initial hypothesis where we believed we would be able to harness the ‘wisdom of crowds’ from our community.

Q: What kind of feedback did you get from consumers?

A: The overall feedback from our customers was great. In addition to making real estate a little more fun, our customers appreciated the extra price opinion they would get with the ‘ZIP Community Price’. The biggest suggestion they had for us was to integrate our community pricing more tightly with our main website so that they’d be able to see price predictions for the specific homes they were interested in.

Q: Talk a little bit about the development effort required to integrate this technology. Is this something most brokerages with their own development team could integrate somewhat easily?

A: In my opinion, if a brokerage has its own development team, this type of integration should be fairly straightforward. While the integration effort won’t be as simple as a Google Maps integration, it certainly is much easier than building this type of application from scratch.

Q: What’s the next innovative feature ZipRealty is working on?

A: In general, we’re always trying to find innovative solutions to make the consumer real estate process easier and more efficient. We haven’t finalized any of our upcoming plans, but we’ll certainly keep you in the loop when we do.

It looks like ZipRealty is the brokerage that will bring community estimating to the general public. ZipRealty has always been one of the most progressive brokerages, so the fact that they are the first brokerage to add community estimating technology to their web site is not unexpected. The technology provider behind the integration is Realius.

The two big things to note here are that now 1) anyone browsing listings on ZipRealty can instantly tell the greater community what they think the listing is worth at a given time and 2) anyone browsing listings can see what the ZipRealty community thinks the listing is worth. This will certainly be a controversial feature with sellers since it brings further transparency to what buyers think their home is worth. Back in July, ZipRealty launched their Price Me Now sub domain and enabled anyone to publish their opinion of the value of a specific listing, but they’ve taken it to the next level with this release and added the functionality onto their listing detail pages to expose it to their entire user base (rather than only the people they got to click through to their Price Me Now sub domain). The new redesign of their estimated value tab of their listing detail pages, which includes the Realius community estimate along with three automated valuations, now contains even more great data consumers are interested in. Below is an example screen shot, or here is a live version on their site for a Seattle listing.

Click for larger image

It’s going to take a little bit of time for community estimates to build up to a point where there are 5 or 10 estimates on many listings, but I think it’s a great feature for consumers in the long run. Particularly for a company like Zip that requires registration to view photos, there won’t be much of a barrier for the majority of their users browsing listings to estimate values of listings they are looking at. In addition to the integration on their revised estimated value tab of listing pages, you can also look at all the estimates on a given home and the date they were generated (example). Each user account also be a page that shows you all the estimates they have completed along with their IQ score - here is my page.

I anticipate we’ll see a few real estate enthusiasts become obsessed with building a high IQ by estimating every listing in their area, but it’ll be interesting to see how the IQ concept develops among the agent and broker community. Over the long haul, a high IQ could prove to be a way for agents to demonstrate they know their local market well. If you are an agent or broker, do you see any value to using this feature to estimate listing prices?

The Realius estimating technology is not free (they make some of their money by selling technology to sites such at Zip) — but for the agents and brokers reading this, aside from the cost, do you see any reason not to integrate this functionality in your web site? My guess would be Redfin, but any other guesses as to the next brokerage to add community estimating to their offering?

Congrats to the team at ZipRealty for their latest innovative release!

I attended the Legal Counsel Seminar at the National Association of REALTORS® convention in Orlando in November. One of the speakers there was Marcel Bryar, deputy general counsel and vice president at Fannie Mae. He spoke about Fannie Mae’s efforts to prevent foreclosures, handle short sales better, and handle foreclosures better. One thing he mentioned was that Fannie Mae is approaching MLSs to obtain listing data from them.

MLS data is my life, so his comments naturally piqued my interest. Here is what I think he was saying, and some thoughts about how MLSs should consider it. (I cannot promise what I say here accurately captures what he said, but you can follow up with him if you want to be sure.)

Clearly, Fannie is struggling to deal with a vast number of troubled loans, especially on the following questions: Should it approve a short sale? How should it price an REO? What kind of workout should it offer a distressed owner? The only way to make these decisions confidently is to have high-quality valuation advice. Fannie regularly seeks valuation advice in the form of appraisals and broker price opinions (BPOs).

But Fannie wants MLS data in order to support systems on its end that analyze and confirm that valuations it’s getting from brokers and appraisers are in the right ball-park. It also wants to use the data for financial modeling, i.e., to make and test projections about what is and will be happening to real estate markets in coming months. It’s asking MLSs to license data to it. Mr. Bryar even shared a proposed contract for the licensing. I expect that Fannie prefers MLS data to merely using public records data for two reasons: (1) MLS data has a lot more rich feature data in it than tax records usually do; and (2) MLS sales reporting is faster than public record sales reporting. (And in some states, there is no public record sales reporting.)

It makes immense sense for Fannie to want to use the best data there is about housing market activity to confirm valuations and to plan its business activities. Does it make sense for MLSs to help? I think there are pros and cons, and if an MLS does work with Fannie, I’d suggest modifying Fannie’s contract to protect broker and MLS interests better.

First, the pros. I think a lack of checks and balances on the professionals in real estate transactions is part of the reason we are here. There’s plenty of blame to go around for the housing bust, but it did not help that Fannie and others had no independent way of checking the valuations on which it relied in a fast-moving market. Providing a tool for it to do so going forward might be (1) civic-minded, in that it might increase Fannie’s chance of success and survival without increasing the taxpayer’s bill for on-going bailouts; (2) smart for the brokerage community, in that it should generally result in Fannie giving more credence to properly prepared BPOs and appraisals; and (3) good for the MLSs, who may be able to call on Fannie for assistance in return down the road. In theory, I think Fannie’s strongest argument is that anything MLS can do to help liquidity return to the real estate market is good for MLS’s broker participants.

On the other hand, MLSs providing data to Fannie have to consider some potential downsides:

1. As a broker, would you want Fannie to tell you it disagrees with your BPO based on its calculations on data from your MLS?

2. How do we know whether Fannie will use the data in ways that actually deliver positive results to the market?

3. Do you trust Fannie Mae to use data only in the ways permitted?

4. Are there any potential unintended consequences here?

It seems to me that reasonable MLSs could decide either way.

But if an MLS does sign with Fannie Mae, I’d suggest revisions to a number of the provisions in Fannie’s proposed contract:

1. Limiting the scope of the license.

2. Stating use limitations more explicitly.

3. Cleaning up a couple problems in the “confidentiality” provisions.

4. Having it be terminable at will (with maybe a 60-day out).

5. Kicking out the clause where MLS indemnifies Fannie (as MLSs don’t create their own data, they really are not in a good position to warrant it against claims of infringement).

6. Changing the limitations on liability (which are mutual, but in the context of this type of transaction, they favor Fannie).

In fairness, I think Mr. Bryar said that Fannie would consider modifications to its agreement or using MLS’s standard license agreement, if it has one.

One other note: NAR policy says that your MLS cannot transmit your listings to anyone for a non-core use without listing broker permission. I wonder whether NAR would consider this a core use of MLS data. If not, the MLS probably has to give brokers notice that it’s sending their listings to Fannie Mae and give them the opportunity to opt out of that transmission. If many brokers were to opt out, it would affect Fannie Mae’s ability to rely on statistical algorithms run against the data it does get.

If your MLS is interested in discussing the matter, you can reach Mr. Bryar at marcel_bryar@fanniemae.com.

What do you think? Should MLSs provide data to Fannie Mae? Why or why not?

-Brian

We’re happy to have the CoRE back here at Geek Estate this week. What was I looking for? As you may or may not know, I’m a huge fan of a strong personal voice, so that was a high priority in my selection process. I also looked for educational value. Did I learn something by reading this? Or did I think their target audience would have learned something?

Since we’re rapidly coming up on the holidays, I thought I’d give this a bit of a Santa Claus theme by naming my awards after some notable figures from the North Pole. Here are this week’s award winners:

Santa Claus Award - Raymond takes this week’s top honor for his post “What Is My Credit Score and How Is My FICO Calculated?” over at Money Blue Book. With the economy in a recession and lending requirements tight, understanding your FICO score is even more critical than it would be in a normal market and Raymond does a thorough job explaining the complex issue. Photo courtesy of HowStuffWorks.

Mrs. Claus Award - Just as Mrs. Claus is vital to making Santa’s work easier, RSS is vital to blogging. Joe Manausa gets this award because his post “What Is A RSS Subscription” article at Tallahassee Real Estate Blog talks about a vital functionality of blogging that doesn’t always get the attention it deserves. It’s safe to say most home owners, buyers, and sellers who are not immersed in Web 2.0 technology do not understand how RSS works. Joe helps explain the technology. Photo courtesy of BuyCostumes.com.

Rudolph Award - Morgan Evans wrote “New York City First time home buyer and Investor Must Read” at Morgan’s New York City Real Estate Blog. I think Morgan’s article is a great example of how to blog for a local consumer market. For those not immersed in the Manhattan real estate market on a day-to-day basis, this is a great educational post detailing the types of units on the market. Since I had never heard of a cond-op, I certainly learned something from the post.

Elf Award- Brian Block takes the Elf award with “The Tale of a Near Death Accident, a Bank Robbery, a Washing Machine & the Completed Short Sale” posted at Virginia Real Estate News. Wow, what a story - I certainly hope every short sale is not this difficult to complete. Since Elves are the ones in the trenches getting things done, I thought this was a good award for Brian’s post since he stuck it out and completed the deal against all odds.

Grinch Award - This has to go to Handy Saputra for “Home Loan Closing Costs May Be Surprising” posted at Home Loan and Mortgage Info. The Grinch tries to ruin Christmas just as mortgage closing costs aim to ruin a buyer closing on a mortgage — and Handy educates borrowers about the charges that might pop up.

Photo courtesy of MajorityRules.org.

Next week’s CoRE will be over at Northwest Indiana Mortgages, so make sure to submit your post by Sunday, Dec. 21 for consideration. I hope you enjoyed this week’s carnival!

With a fair number of agents and brokers likely planning web site redesigns in 2009 in order to stand out from the competition, I’m going to start spending as much time as I can gathering insights from agents and brokers going through the redesign process (if you or someone you know is in that boat, please e-mail me). I’ll post best practices, lessons learned, and available data sources here on Geek Estate Blog. With that said, I tracked down an agent in South Carolina currently going through the process, Seth Siegler from Carolina One Real Estate, and had a chance to ask him a few questions via e-mail regarding his motives and goals for his redesign. Below are my questions with his responses:

Q: What was the biggest factor in your decision to undertake a web site overhaul?

A: I decided to look into overhauling my website after seeing other agents and brokerages coming out with new sites with new features. After seeing a few of them in action, I started to feel like I was getting left behind! Although my Charleston Real Estate site is still pretty cutting edge for my market (Charleston, SC), I saw the new ideas and concepts as a way to gain an edge. I’d be the first one around here with some of the new toys.

Plus the whole internet has changed and a lot of real estate websites look REALLY dated now. Also, as soon as my new search was finished last year, I already had a million new ideas for how I would do it differently. I learned a LOT from that first development process…

Q: What are you aiming to accomplish with your new web site?

A: I’m hoping for weekly truck deliveries of large denomination cash….

Besides that….I’m hoping to have a website that is so useable and helpful that it becomes an address that people bookmark and reccomend to their friends. I’m working on TONS more content, video and feature ideas. I’d like it to make it to page one on Google too. I’m currently on page two of “charleston real estate”. I have a few friends who are on page one, and that’s all the difference in the world, traffic-wise.

Q: What data sources have you been looking at to help you accomplish your goals?

A: There really are a lot of API’s out there now. I’m looking at using the Zillow.com API for past sale data and Zestimates. Education.com for schools and of course, Onboard Informatics has all sorts of data for sale but that is not free…..At all……

Q: Talk a little bit about the decision of a template site versus a completely customized web site.

A: I think template sites are a great business idea….For the companies that sell them….

For the agents, I think it is a waste of money. You have no chance of being “the” site that people are going to use and you have no chance of really climbing the Google ranks. You’re site will obviously look like the other sites using the same template and really if you are hoping to use your website as a lead capture device, then you need to have something custom built.

You are definitely going to spend some money but if you are committed to that particular business plan, then it may be worth it.

Q: Are there any really good agent or broker sites that you have used for ideas?

A: I remember really looking into other brokerage and agent websites when I was coming up with ideas for my current website. I was always really impressed with the amount of information that Redfin manages to put onto their listing detail pages and the clean-cut look of sites like Estately.com.

But after a while, I found myself getting an idea from here and another one from there but then eventually my home page looked like a circus…waaay tooo much to look at.

I crumbled it all up and threw it away and started with a fresh sheet of paper. I started asking my friends (who were not in the business), about what they would like to see on a real estate website. That’s when I really started getting good ideas. Everyone had SO much to say about that. They were frustrated about all sorts of kinks in the road. Basically I found that people do not want to talk to a Realtor until it’s time to see a house in person.

And you know what? Thanks ok with me! And that really got the wheels turning.

If you have suggestions for Seth’s web site redesign, please leave a comment. I’ll try to get him to do another round of questions once his website is completed to discuss his lessons learned from the process. Thanks Seth — and best of luck with the web site redesign!

Here’s a great way to syndicate and manage RSS feeds like none other I’ve seen.  Feedfuze allows you to create fuzes, then place them in containers to be hosted on your Blog or Website.  Fully functional with editing capability.  You can select which articles from which feeds you choose to share.

The containers can be customized to your specifications and expectations. I have used grazr.com in the past for multiple RSS feeds, but Feedfuze in my opinion has a better layout with better functionality and more customizable options.

Here’s a sample of the fuzes and container I just setup in about 15 minutes. You can also create links to your own Feedfuze Page. If you have a site you want to bring in RSS feeds, Feedfuze is certainly worth checking out.