The future of online advertising

There may be an opportunity now for MLSs to partner with Newspapers to provide the services offered to them by Trulia, Zillow, and Homefinder - but will they? For those of us who are old enough to remember the birth of online advertising, you will recall its first steps - text descriptions of properties. It was a simple construct - take the news classifieds and make them viewable online. Then came the birth of .jpg compression - allowing film to be scanned and published online. The publishing industry and the early MLS industry understood this process only too well - those [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:26:04-07:00July 26th, 2010|Main category|0 Comments
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MLS needed for Social Media Pilot Program

WAV Group has been working with many MLSs to understand the complex balance between protecting MLS content and supporting the needs of subscribers who are looking to publish listing content on social media sites like facebook. A technology vendor is seeking an MLS partner help pilot a program. The goals of the pilot are to insure that the product does the following. 1. Supports agents and brokers who want to publish their listings to facebook 2. Protects MLS content digital rights and adheres to MLS rules and regulations 3. Provides ease of use for agents and brokers If you want [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:26:04-07:00July 21st, 2010|Main category|0 Comments
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Third Parties making money from disorganized real estate

My Rant - WAV Group has been pretty outspoken about third party listing websites. They exist because brokers, MLSs, and Associations have not elevated their thinking about listing syndication. I think that it is time for CMLS, NAR, Realty Alliance, or some mutual benefit organization to step up and harness listing distribution and revenues from listing distribution to return revenue to its rightful owner - the brokers. Here are the problems 1.  Data that appears on third party listing websites is grossly inaccurate - as high as 40% in some markets. Inaccurate data leads to bad leads, irritated home buyers [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:26:04-07:00July 9th, 2010|Broker-Agent Information, Main category|0 Comments
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A lesson from a departed friend – Chris Warner

We write so much in our industry about stuff.  Stuff like technology, politics, data and other topics dominate our blogs and daily reading but today I want to share a few thoughts about a person that many of you may not know, Chris Warner, who was very important to me, and others, in our early days in our industry.  Chris recently passed away.  Chris and I, like many of our cohorts in our industry, worked together at PRC Realty Systems in the 80’s when the whole MLS industry was in the process of becoming computerized.  I actually learned of Chris’s [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:26:04-07:00July 7th, 2010|Clients, Main category, MLS Insights, Our Company|0 Comments
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RE Technology updates server environment

All very cool and exciting stuff.  We are very fortunate to be positioned on the intersection where the primary fiber optic passes between the United States and Asia.  From San Luis Obispo, the fiber gets split and moved north to San Jose and south to Los Angeles. RE Technology is pleased to announce our hosting facility has levereged this location in to improve our services. Over the last 18 months, our hosting partner planned Northern and Southern backbone upgrades, as well as peering and transit hand-off upgrades at RE Technology hosting locations in Los Angeles and San Jose. Up until [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:26:04-07:00July 1st, 2010|Main category|0 Comments
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Electronic Faxing becoming a “core” service offering for MLSs

Core service offerings for MLSs continues to evolve and expand as MLSs look for ways to help their subscribers save money while serving the needs of their clients better. According to the 2009 CMLS MLS Operations Benchmarking Survey, nearly 60% of MLSs now provide Electronic faxing and Document Management as a core service offering. As noted in the 2009 WAV Group Transaction Management Adoption Study, usage of methods for processing transactions online continue to grow.  Agents first become comfortable with processing forms online. That process worked so well that they are now quickly adopting other online tools to make the process of [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:26:04-07:00June 30th, 2010|Broker-Agent Information, MLS Insights|0 Comments
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CARETS partners with NAR to offer competition to Loopnet

LoopNet™ has 4 Million members and they are the dominate player in offering MLS like services to the commercial real estate industry.  Their business model is different.  Commercial Sales agents and consumers all pay for subscriptions.  Some would say that LoopNet is highly successful, others would say that they are holding the commercial real estate industry hostage. As we have seen in the past, the National Association of REALTORS® has done plenty to intercept these types of trade concerns in real estate.  Perhaps the best example is the formation of Sentrilock™ as a competitor to GE Supra’s lock box domination. [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:26:05-07:00June 22nd, 2010|Main category, MLS Insights|0 Comments
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Jeremy Crawford awarded CIO of the year for Sandicor

Sandicor, San Diego county’s Regional MLS is announced that its cheif information officer, Jeremy Crawford recently was awarded the Information Technology of the Year award by the San Diego Business Journal.  the Journal crafted the award to recognize outstanding achievements in the bustling technology sector of the San Diego economy. As chief information officer for Sandicor, Crawford oversees all of Sandicor’s information technology services, including infrastructure, data services, training services, and technical support services. Crawford provides Multiple Listing Services (MLS) as well as ancillary real estate products and services including online tax services, mobile applications, CRM software solutions, real estate lock box [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:26:05-07:00June 21st, 2010|Main category|0 Comments
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RBI – Real Estate Business Intelligence Launches

MRIS and RBI are pleased to announce the launch of the data analytics company, RealEstate Business Intelligence, and its new website, www.rbintel.com.  RBI is a wholly owned subsidiary of MRIS, the nation’s largest MLS provider to agents and brokers. Agents, brokers, appraisers and other real estate professionals can now receive the most reliable housing market data in the Mid-Atlantic region via www.rbintel.com - empowering them to make more educated decisions for their clients. RBI provides an in-depth understanding of real estate activity at the regional, county and local levels in the Mid-Atlantic housing market that has not previously been available. Based upon data [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:26:05-07:00June 17th, 2010|Main category, MLS Insights|0 Comments
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Is an MLS Like a bank?

I have been rather absorbed with the problems with Intuit the past couple of days.  They went down tuesday night and we had to switch our payment processing over to paypal during the outage.  Thankfully, we had a backup plan. Our back up plan gets simulated monthly across all systems.  Thankfully it worked when it needed to, but not without the full on efforts of the development team. I was able to sit down with David Charon of Metropolitan Regional Information Systems (MRIS) last week.  I am not sure how it came up, but he mentioned that his MLS system produces around [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:26:05-07:00June 17th, 2010|Main category, MLS Insights|0 Comments
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Intuit does social networking wrong

We gave the “love” to Quickbooks in our last post, now we will slam them in this post - they have it all wrong when it comes to social networking.  In our little real estate industry, we find companies like RPR, Trulia, Zillow and many others have full time social networking people who are managing real engagement on blogs, social networks and twitter.  However, there are many companies who are taking the approach of what J.D. Salinger’s famous Holden Caulfield called Phony. You see, Intuit is facing a major outage today - their massive number of websites and e-commerce solutions went dark [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:26:05-07:00June 16th, 2010|Main category|0 Comments
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A web services lesson from Quickbooks

When it comes to web services, Quickbooks gets it.  They understand that the work begins after the sale, not leading up to it. I recently had the opportunity to attend the RIS Media conference.  There was a room full of vendors barking about the promised land that would be achieved magically through the adoption of thier products - generate more leads, track this, engage consumers this way, reduce costs here.  In preparation for my panel address to the audience, I asked each booth to talk to me about thier support and training services.  What happens after the sale? The responses [...]

By |2018-05-03T21:26:05-07:00June 16th, 2010|Main category|0 Comments
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