The red Letter: Getting Ready For The Next Great Thing.
By Ira Luntz, SVP, Data Products
Ker-Plah – Klingon for success!
Krep-lach – A great tasting Jewish meat pie.
I want to take a moment to rant about some important things like meat pies and success. Coming back from the recent NAR mid-year conference, my wife asked a simple question: “Did we make things better”?
It got me thinking. How do we measure “success” as industry technologists? Driving traffic to websites, tracking lead activity, creating nifty analytics and reports, collaboration, CRM, back-office systems … (the list goes on and on).
We grind up the meat and make the pies, but how tasty are they?
At the convention, the conversations swirled yet again around national MLS data standards, Apple-like app stores, listing syndication and MLS data license rights.
Believe us, we love standards. They create efficiencies and inter-operability. But, one thing is certain: this business is a local business. A home buyer in Tucson, Arizona, could care less about “seawall condition” in Sarasota, Florida. And for that matter, neither would a buyer in Orlando, Florida.
As a collective, we can’t even agree on something as simple as taking a listing off the market. The off-market status definitions vary from “pending,” “under contract,” “DABO,” and more. Some mean “continue-to-show,” while some don’t.
While there is no question that a national MLS data standard, or a national app store platform would make MLS data more accessible and application development easier and cheaper, making structural changes in the 500 plus MLS databases, systems and applications comes at a big cost and will take a lot of time. We all know we can standardize around the most common 100 data fields, but if the market has resisted a solution for so long, maybe it really is trying to tell us something.
Our advice is this: embrace localism and focus on what we can accomplish.
By using each MLS’s unique and locally pertinent data set, we can put all sorts of local flavors into the meat pies. We can make things taste better. And by simplifying and automating the local data licensing processes we can serve up the pies while protecting the intellectual property rights of the broker and the MLS.
Everyone has different tastes. At RED, we listen well to the folks who use the stuff made out of listing data and we expect to season our products with local flavors. Operating one of the largest repositories of MLS data in the nation, we are standing ready to support any standard that gains market momentum.
But at the same time we’re doubling-down, with a renewed energy on the MLS data experience at the local level. We’re moving ahead with new investments in the standards and depth of data that we have been delivering for years.
Kerplah!
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