One of the many ambitions under the leadership at the National Association of REALTORS® is to engage in establishing a beachhead for companies to introduce innovative new solutions in real estate. The manifestation of this strategy is the launch of a conference that will invite innovators to connect with industry leaders to foster collaboration. The conference is called iOi. It was recently brought to my attention by Chris Bennett of CoreLogic is his monthly communication. The conference takes place in San Francisco August 29th-30th.

On the heels of another successful Inman Connect conference, it will be exciting to participate in the iOi event. I am especially excited for the Wednesday afternoon agenda

Key Forces That Will Shape the Real Estate Industry Over the Next Decade

I am not a big futurist, but I like to see the perspectives that folks shar. If you look back on what people were talking about 10 years ago in real estate, you find some interesting observations. Our 2008 research reports included Listhub Listing Syndication Effectiveness, Your Reputation, Broker Website Effectiveness Study, MLS Consumer Website effectiveness, Mobile Search Whitepaper, Top Producers Sell More Real Estate Using Smartphones.

Do you notice how these things play out today?

Listing Syndication is about to be overhauled – Trestle, Bridge, Upstream, Listhub, The Grid……

Managing agent reputations is still a complete mess that needs to be fixed.

Broker Website Effectiveness has remained ever-challenging. We suggested in our research that brokers transition their websites from being IDX sites to become parcel centric websites. Redfin, Movoto, and a few other brokers did that. It worked out pretty well for them. I wonder if any other firms will wake up in 2019.

MLS Consumer Website Effectiveness continues to be a major driver of change in real estate. What HAR.com demonstrated to the industry a decade ago continues today. I am overjoyed to see the cooperation between MLSs and Brokers who have joined together to develop a nationwide MLS consumer facing website – the Broker Public Portal initiative is one of the fastest growing efforts in our industry and Homesnap is growing in agent and consumer adoption every minute of every day.

Obviously, Homesnap was selected as a partner to the Broker Public Portal, in part, because of their excellence is mobile property search. The product is awesome and certainly ranks at or above the quality of mobile search offered by the advertising portals.

I do not think that any real estate professional is operating without a smartphone today. I guess that is the only new trend from a decade ago that we can put to bed. I am not even sure that phone manufacturers even make phones that are not smartphones anymore. Rest in peace to the Palm Pilot and the Motorola Flip phone.

Other agenda topics for Wednesday include:

Competitive Landscape for innovation

Venture Capital in real estate

Machine learning, data mining and aI

The Global impact of FinTech

Predictive Analytics

All in all – it looks awesome. Click here to see the full agenda and speakers. Some pretty cool folks are lined up that we do not get to see often. If you do register and want to hang out, hit me up and we can make that happen.