As a business consultant, we are rarely found in the conference sessions – but we did have 41 meetings and we caught up with many industry friends.  Word of Mouth in the hallway indicates that agents found the conference very informative and engaging, brokers and MLSs were pretty disappointed.

  1. NYC is strange – every time I come to New York I find it odd that real estate is conducted so uniquely in the city.  It challenges me to think about the implications of widespread disorder in accessing listing information.  There are 11,000 agents in NYC that spend a tremendous amount of time contacting listing agents for information that should be at their fingertips.
  2. RPR – It did not occur to me that RPR TAX API will need to have a tax interface wrapped around it.  I wonder who will emerge as a key provider of the interface software.  Looking forward to the data licensing agreement.
  3. Rethinking Search – I was a bit surprised that IDX vendors were not screaming from the rafters about allowing Google to index listings in the wake of NAR’s blessing.  MainRhode and Terabitz being the exceptions.
  4. Listhub should have a great 2010 – the will offer an “ad Marketplace” that will allow a broker to purchase advertising and other enhancements to promote listings across all of the third party websites in one place – This will save brokers a lot of pain.
  5. Mobile is maturing – learned from 3 large brokers that adding mobile search on signs has begun to move the needle – You can forecast 1 lead per day for every 30 signs.
  6. NAR is going to fix RETS and make it work.
  7. Talking about Social Networking is about as interesting as having a conference about using Microsoft Outlook for Mail or a browser to search the internet.  Enough already!  We get it.
  8. Our friend Ira Luntz will have access to more real estate data than anyone on the planet – possibly all real estate data – unreal.
  9. The recession is over