Tales from the Techside

One of the great things about my job is all the incredible conversations I get to have with people involved at every level of the real estate industry, from Brokers and agents, to title reps and affiliates, vendors and 3rd parties I get to interface with them all and it is great!

An almost constant theme I keep hearing from the people I talk with is that they are frustrated with the limited way they can share content with the consumers on the internet. The average agent is well aware that most people turn to the internet prior to making a buying decision but they are not sure how to convert the page views in to leads. So what ends up happening in many cases is that they put off devloping their website until they can “do it right”. From the broker perspective they see the value of having a website but like the agents many are simply not sure how to take the content offerings to the next level.

The way I see it there are two primary problems first is that IDX is limited in what it can do and costly to implement in a custom manner, second the thought leaders in the industry are still trying to wrap their heads around how to use emerging technologies effectively to market listings.

The guys over at 1000 watt consulting have a great article entitled Time for MLSs to get social and I think they hit the nail on the head. It is important that MLS vendors become aware that these are the features that agents want. For instance have an open house input on the MLS is convient but it would be great if we had an external site for the public to view the open houses from the MLS platform. It would be really great if listings could be rated, the number of views tracked, and comments could be left for agents allowing them to recieve feed back and bring the MLS to another level in terms of networking (there are a couple that do some of these and many are working to doing them all).

At the association level we hear from our members that they want to see these changes and we work on bringing them about. For instance a public display of open houses was requested by members my counterpart at the Contra Costa Association of REALTORS took the iniative and began work on a system called Homesopentoday.com and then brought me into the project the response from our collective membership has been incredible.

The real problem is not the lack of desire to change it is the lack of agility to change. Many of these organizations are held back by several issues first is size, second is bueracracy, third is internal resistance. For Bay East I don’t believe it is any of these things it is simply a lack of available manpower. We have a little less than 30 staff and we service 7000 members and affiliates.

At the end of the day we may have spoken with 20 - 100 individual members on overlapping issues. This means I have to choose my projects carefully and go with the ideas that have the most opportunity to stick. We were working on listing syndication in 2005 but it was put aside for us to work on a major overhauling of our internal support systems that allowed the association work more cohesive group then merely the sum of its parts. This led to rapid increase in service satisfaction from our members and ultimately has allowed us to offer many more services then we could have previously. The unpalatable truth is often decisions must be made and so the end result is that I have more ideas then I have time or resources.

So what are some ideas do I think have not been acted on yet -

1. Facebook application for REALTORS that would act like Trulia Voices and the REALTORS who tapped into that network would have incredible opportunity to reach a new market. It could also act as a referral system or rookie resource.
2. A google map that shows where people are moving from too. This information can be found in the US census data and would be really helpful for internal an external marketing efforts. For instance if you could identify that people from Pleasanton are moving to Brentwood you could send property flyers for homes in Brentwood out. Or create a pleasanton-to-brentwood resource site.

I have more but none are fleshed out enough to share and would not necessarily fit within the scope of this article. How would you use data in a perfect world? What are your biggest frustrations with working with listing data, the MLS, the association?

–Mark Flavin

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