Larry Cragun wrote a brilliant post against being led to being a lead, advising consumers: “To give yourself the best opportunity to select a great agent: don’t respond as a lead from a major website. Instead, find an agent’s website, most have them. Better yet, find an agent that blogs. Visit these sites regularly, you will get to know them, even though it is only in your computer.” Shortly after Larry posted his article, Kris Berg posted an excellent article over on the Bloodhound Blog, divulging her analysis of the pros and cons of single property web sites and how her broker’s relationship with Yahoo! can direct traffic away from her site. These two posts presented a slight contrast, with Larry cogently explaining why consumers should focus on agent web sites and Kris explaining how her broker’s relationship with a listing portal was making it harder for consumers to do just that. Hmmm.
Of course, consumers want to see listings, whether they are on a listing portal, a broker’s site or an agent’s site. Sure, they’re more likely than not going to need an agent at some point, but both buyers and sellers start by looking for listings. Buyers want to see what’s for sale and sellers want to see comps so they have an idea what their house might be worth. Let’s call this the exploration stage. The potential buyers and sellers aren’t ready to commit to anything, they just want to inform themselves. They want to learn. Learning is what the web is all about, getting people information quickly, easily and more comprehensively than ever before. At this “exploration” stage, people don’t want to be bothered. Just like in the retail stores, when asked by the clerk if they can be helped, most respond, “No thanks, just shopping!”
Also, when consumers are learning, they want to know that they’re getting the full and complete picture, which may be why the listing portals get most of the traffic in any given geographic region and broker or franchise web sites don’t. With IDX and the ability for brokers (and agents, in many areas) to put the MLS listings on their web site, the perception of their sites as being incomplete or biased may be wrong. Of course, this depends on the circumstances, the local market, and the MLS coverage of that market, which is exactly why many brokers are clamoring for regionalization. They want to show the consumer a complete picture.
The IDX (internet data exchange) policies of MLSs across the country have gone a long way to help brokers and agents present this complete picture to consumers, but the objective and the result was muddied along the way. (IDX was one of those balanced decisions I discussed in MLS is More Than Technology; a decision which could not have occurred, most likely, without a bit of representational democracy.) First, some brokers decided not to participate (opted out) because they had legitimate questions regarding whether the data was going to be misused to generate and sell leads back to them. Then, to get around the opt outs, some argued that they were just operating a “virtual office” and so should be able to show all the data, including those who opted out. Controversy ensued, NAR tried to reach a compromise with the ILD policy, and the DOJ sued. The DOJ lawsuit created a vacuum, freezing many MLSs, brokers, and agents from innovation. Of course, vacuums get filled, and the listing portals like Trulia, Google Base, Yahoo! real estate, and others have only been too willing to accommodate. While the industry was battling legal challenges, others were innovating and now they’re in front of the consumer. This leap of innovation and consumer mind-share grab has resulted in franchises like Realogy concluding that they need to get the brokers’ listings on these portals (as long as the franchise gets the leads or the broker pays for them, apparently). Thus, the fear that caused some brokers to opt-out of IDX in the first instance is now true — someone else is collecting the leads off their listings. Oh my!
IDX was a great idea. Larry Cragun and Kris Berg have it right, the agents should be delivering the listing information to the consumer. Importantly, this argument should not be confused with those who think agents make a living simply by hording the listing information. I seriously doubt that ever worked as a long term business model, but, if it did, there is no question that such a model won’t survive today. No, what I’m suggesting (and what I think Larry and Kris are suggesting) is that the agent is on the front lines and there should be as little friction as possible between them and their potential clients. Isn’t that what the web revolution is all about, efficiency, knowledge, and power to individuals? That was the promise of IDX and I think it can still be brought to fruition.
Here’s how we can revive IDX. Brokers and agents should be allowed to put all the listing information on their web sites. The IDX data set should be complete (which should get the DOJ off the NAR’s back) and brokers should be assured that someone else isn’t going to sell leads from their data (this is called compromise). Once data standards are established, promising a strong and comprehensive data product from brokers and agents to consumers, NAR should create and heavily promote a branding and logo program for legitimate IDX sites so consumers can have confidence they are seeing everything. (No, I’m not crazy, this is a really good idea, if you pause to think about it. See, the NYSE and NASDAQ for examples.) Consumers should be able to shop till they drop, without being bothered, until they’re ready to engage. But, when they are ready to engage, they should be one click away from the agent who is going to serve them. Getting funneled through lead site after lead site before getting to the agent is not efficient and is not consumer-friendly.
I would be remiss in this post about consumer shopping if I didn’t mention Jessica Swesey’s recent post on Inman Blog asking if sites should require a “lead form” (submission of contact info) or not. The comments to her post have been great and most respondents said, nope, don’t ask visitors to enter contact info in order to search. Requiring contact info just produces bad leads, false information, and frustrated visitors. Kevin Mazur from the Tropical Realty Blog had tried it both ways, and found that, without the lead form (giving the customer a choice), they received fewer but better leads. Others suggested a balanced approach, where you give some info for free, and then ask for registration for access to further information, worked well.
One possible cause of the disparity in the comments is that each was focusing on a different stage of the consumer’s decision making process. If everyone agreed that they were talking about a consumer who was “just looking,” I suspect most would agree that those are bad leads and forcing them to register is a bad idea. Similarly, most would agree that giving the visitor an opportunity to register is a good idea once the consumer has moved past the “just looking” stage. The transition from shopper to someone who is more serious may be as easy as providing an opportunity to save searches and get automatic updates, which necessarily require registration of some sort. I still don’t think site owners should spam people who register, but there certainly isn’t anything wrong with asking a few questions when the person does register to determine their interest.
The value proposition seems clear: (1) consumers need listings to learn more about the market; (2) brokers can supply the listings; and (3) agents can help educate the consumers on what the listings mean. The technology needs to facilitate this value proposition in as complete and unobtrusive manner as possible. If we can do that, there need be no losers from listings or leads.
Okay, a bit more beginner blogger thrashing around. My last post asked for feedback on what you think is the best way to handle large numbers of listings on maps, because the current systems have some significant limitations. I wanted to include in that original post a poll on your thoughts as to the best of the options I reviewed, but including a poll wasn’t as easy as I had hoped, until now (thanks PollDaddy!). So, hopefully this isn’t breaching blogging etiquette but I’m going to post twice on the same topic to see if anyone’s interested in mapping on MLS systems at all (and isn’t bored or frustrated yet). Here’s the poll:
A description of the options is in my last post. Let us know what you think.
We’re designing a new mapping module for our MLS software and one of the key design decisions we’re trying to make is how to handle large listing search result sets on the map. The challenge is that the current method of using JavaScript to manage the display of the listing points on the map isn’t scalable much beyond a few hundred and certainly not to several thousand listings. Other sites that use mapping seem to deploy a couple of methods to solve this challenge and I’m interested in which one you all think is best.
1. Only Display the First 50 (or some other number) of Matches. This approach solves the problem by only displaying a set number of listings on the map at one time. A good example of this is ShackPrices, which limits the display to the first 50 matches. This approach has the advantage of being relatively clear to the user and allows the user to sort the results to see the “most important” 50. The disadvantage is that it doesn’t give the user any sense of the context of the larger result set on the map.
2. Require the User to Zoom In. This approach solves the problem by requiring the user to zoom in on the map to a point where a manageable number of listings are displayed. An example of this approach is John L Scott, which shows this when too many matches exist:
The advantage of this approach is that it’s pretty easy. The disadvantage is that it limits the usefulness of the map to relatively small or less active listing areas.
3. Clusters. The third approach is to use “cluster points,” which basically uses a single point to resprent a large number of listings. Trulia uses this approach:
The advantage of clusters is you can still get some sense of the listing counts in an area even with high volumes. The disadvantage is that you still don’t get a full context. I think Trulia’s approach could be improved slightly by using varying sized icons to represent the relative size of the listing counts, similar to how GapMinder (recently bought by Google) does for statistics.
4. Non-Active Points. Another approach is to not use JavaScript to display the points, but rather pre-render map image tiles at higher zoom levels on a nightly basis and then display them as a tile overlay. This is the approach taken by ColoradoHomeStop and here’s a screen shot of listings in and around Denver:
This approach is similar to the heat maps used by Trulia and others in that the map tiles are pre-rendered as opposed to rendering them on the fly or live. The disadvantage, of course, is that the data isn’t live, it’s at least a day or more old, but at these high zoom levels, that shouldn’t matter too much. The advantage is that you can see the full context of the listings at all zoom levels. This approach can look really cool with different colors per status or other key criteria to see trends on a more macro level.
Please let us know what you think is the best of the approaches described above.
(I originally had included a poll option here, but it didn’t work properly because we’re using cross domains. Sorry. We’ll try to get the poll added back in but, until then, please add your comments below.)
We’ve now got GIS expertise in-house and are working directly with a very large number of counties throughout the country on collecting parcel maps, imagery and other data layers.
Clareity Consulting released its 6th Annual MLS Customer Satisfaction Survey today. Matt Cohen from Clareity did an excellent job again this year and really went the extra mile digging into the numbers. Matt put a new twist on the survey by creating some hypothetical customer profiles to help MLSs use the results more effectively. Clareity also hired a statistician to help crunch the numbers. The results for FBS? Although we ranked highly on the overall end-user and MLS staff satisfaction rankings (as we have every year in this survey), we didn’t match up very well to any of the three hypothetical MLSs. We’ll just have to hope those hypothetical MLSs stay that way.
P.S. Matt Cohen graciously points out in a comment to this post that the rankings on a couple of the hypotheticals were pretty much tied among the vendors. I guess I’m just as focused on the “rankings” as everyone else and overlooked the details. Thanks for clarifying, Matt!
Point2 recently announced the addition of some real time stats (IE Only!) to their site. After reluctantly switching to IE so I could check out the stats, I glanced through them and saw that they reported 15,542,076 page views for the last 30 days (as of 03/26/2007 at 4:54 p.m. CDT). That number surprised me because our hosted MLS system does about 2.5 million page views a day during the week. I looked up our numbers for the last 30 days and found we delivered 68,135,209 page views, or over four times what Point2 is doing.
The volume difference may be even more striking because Point2 claims 117,899 members, which is about three times more than we host (we have other clients that host the system in their own data center, but we currently host our system for about 35,000 end users). In other words, on a per user basis, our members appear to be using the system about ten times as much as Point2 users (1,793 page views a month versus about 132 for Point2). Why are these numbers so different?
One possibility is that the page views I quoted above for our system include what we call “public” traffic from our members’ clients through e-mails and their IDX web sites. The public traffic represents about 42% of our total traffic. I have no idea whether the Point2 numbers include any e-mail links or any other kind of traffic. But, even stripping out the public traffic, we’re still doing well over five times what Point2 is doing per user. Another possibility is that the user numbers Point2 reports are inflated by all the “standard” or non-paying users who’ve signed up. Yet another possibility is that page views really don’t mean much any more, as AJAX calls make the definition of “a page” pretty amorphous. Maybe they’re counting pages differently than we are, who knows? The bottom line is that it’s pretty hard to compare these numbers reliably, without knowing more, and that’s why I called the post “Playing With Numbers.” They’re fun to play around with but may not mean much at the end of the day.
Thanks very much to miOaklandCounty for selecting my Raging Regionals post for the 35th Carnival of Real Estate. My voice isn’t as pretty as Diana Ross or any of the Supreme’s, but I’m proud of the “hit” nonetheless. I promise to try hard not to be a one hit wonder!
Yes, that’s right, FBS, a technology company, is saying that the MLS is much more than the technology we or others may provide. I’ll demonstrate why first by commenting on the recent news that the Real Estate Board of New York (REBNY) announced (PDF) they are hiring Trulia to build a public listings portal. In Trulia’s blog post on the topic, they state: “For the non-New York readers out there…it’s worth noting that Manhattan’s hugely important real estate market does not have a widely used MLS that would allow access to all listings through any single Web site today.”
I think this statement has the potential to mislead readers through two negative implications:
Neither of these implicationsare true. First, Trulia isn’t creating an MLS system, they are helping REBNY create a public advertising portal of active listings, basically shifting their advertising dollars from the New York Times to Trulia. I’ve previously discussed why an advertising portal is not an MLS and REBNY provides a further difference in that their members do not share information regarding sold listings and there isn’t any indication that’s going to change with the Trulia public portal. Second, this deal will not include “all listings” in NYC because REBNY members will be able to opt out of the new portal and not all brokers in NYC are members of REBNY. That the REBNY/Trulia deal is neither an MLS nor a complete listing portal for NYC is made clear by comparison to the Manhattan MLS, which offers competition to REBNY and supplies listing data to Realtor.com, which continues to be the largest listing portal collecting information from hundreds of MLSs across the country.
In a comment I made in reply to Greg Swann’s post on the Trulia announcement, I said that the oddities of the NYC real estate practice make changes there a poor predictor of what may happen in the rest of the country. However, after reading a bit more about this, I now see that the story and conflicts in NYC are similar to the debates occurring in the rest of the country. I posted last week about the success the Houston Association of REALTORS® has had with their public listing portal and how that contrasts with the traditional thinking that MLSs should stay out of the listing portal business to avoid taking traffic away from broker and agent sites. The news of Trulia and REBNY’s venture seems to strengthen the conclusion that MLS listing portals are a critical issue as consumers look for independent sources of information. Also, the membership demand that REBNY allow opt outs is reminiscent of the debate that is at the center of the DOJ litigation against the NAR.
As I mentioned in one of my earlier posts on MLS regionalization, all of these issues are closely related to each other:
As Brian Larson pointed out in a comment to my Death of the MLS? post, Point2 presents a model that is attempting to bridge this gap, creating broker and agent sites that allow them to share listings with each other and hopefully stay top of mind for consumers.
What’s missing from the Point2 model, however, is the cooperative framework of the MLS (ironically, exactly what the DOJ complains about). Point2 tries to use software to be the MLS but the MLS needs more than just software to create an atmosphere of trust that makes brokers and agents willing to share data with each other and reach a critical mass of listings. As an example, check out Point2′s few hundred listings for Houston compared to HAR’s 30,000+. This critical mass of listings is only able to be reached because of the trust created by the process that is the MLS.
Some of you familiar with MLS politics may be thinking, “Are you kidding? We don’t trust the MLS!” Ahh, but the majority do, and that’s the key. The MLS leadership (in almost all cases) was elected by their local peers. They’ve been entrusted with making decisions for the entire group. This little bit of representative democracy is what differentiates the MLS from non-cooperative models, and it has nothing to do with technology. This bit of politics is critical to establishing critical mass for two reasons:
The representative decision-making process of the MLS is what allows for the broad cooperation necessary to create critical mass in terms of data sharing. Without this, I believe we’ll simply have a mishmash of data strewn here and there, with no possibility of a national repository or any other useful portal. The MLS embraces the duality of competition and cooperation, and strikes a limited balance that enables critical mass to be established. This feat should not be underestimated. Fully cognizant that I may be stretching the importance of this issue, the words of no less than George Washington in his letter of transmittal of the Constitution for ratification may be instructive here:
In all our deliberations on this subject we kept steadily in our view, that which appears to us the greatest interest of every true American, the consolidation of our Union, in which is involved our prosperity, felicity, safety, perhaps our national existence. This important consideration, seriously and deeply impressed on our minds, led each state in the Convention to be less rigid on points of inferior magnitude, than might have been otherwise expected; and thus the Constitution, which we now present, is the result of a spirit of amity, and of that mutual deference and concession which the peculiarity of our political situation rendered indispensable.
That it will meet the full and entire approbation of every state is not perhaps to be expected; but each will doubtless consider that had her interest been alone consulted, the consequences might have been particularly disagreeable or injurious to others; that it is liable to as few exceptions as could reasonably have been expected, we hope and believe; that it may promote the lasting welfare of that country so dear to us all, and secure her freedom and happiness, is our most ardent wish.
Of course, just as our Constitution has been tested and stressed through changing times, so, too, has the MLS. We’re clearly in such a time right now as our relationships are being transformed by the web. Many are questioning whether the MLS should be Association owned or whether the MLSs should become broker owned. This is a good question and should be answered by whichever approach gives voice to those being led. If this is done, just as the Constitution and our country have survived, so, too, will the MLS, because the MLS brings something to the table that cannot be replaced by technology: Trust. Technology can foster trust, but it cannot form it. True competition requires some cooperation. Not a lot, but some.
This is why I believe the MLS will survive and even thrive. As HAR has shown, the MLS is in the best position to create strong listing portals that benefit brokers, agents and consumers. The MLS is in the best position to do this because they can present the data in an independent way, representative of all the competing brands. When it comes to effective local search, brand emphasis is no longer very effective. Companies like Trulia may turn out to be a great partner for MLSs in building these portals, but I don’t think so, because I don’t see the current business models they are forming as fostering cooperation in the long run.
For example, one of the most interesting, as yet unconfirmed, aspects of the Trulia/REBNY deal is that there is some sort of revenue share involved. Will the revenue share result in funds flowing back to brokers? Who will direct the advertising on Trulia’s site, which presumably is what will generate the revenue to be shared? Will that advertising be from brokers participating in the revenue share, such that they’ll effectively be getting back part of their ad spend? If broker advertising is allowed, how will that effect the opt out rates? If an ad supported revenue share is involved, I think that would be a mistake. I suggest the successful model for a listing portal is not advertising supported. The site should focus on promoting the homes for sale and the brokers and agents listing and selling them. As the controversies swirling around Realtor.com have shown, introducing advertising introduces too many sources of tensions that break down cooperation.
Similarly, the more I learn about the deal between Realogy and Trulia, the more I think it cries out for a strong, independent MLS portal. Over on the Bloodhound, Greg Swann suggested that Realogy would be selling leads from Trulia back to their franchisees. I responded that I thought that was unlikely, because many brokers are already getting leads directly back to their web sites when Trulia scrapes their sites for listings, and wouldn’t want to see that change just because Realogy was now supplying the listings. However, someone else commented:
To clarify a few points mentioned in the comments above, let it be known that all C21 and ERA listings link back to their respective corporate sites (c21.com, era.com), unless–and herein lies the rub–the broker pays Trulia an advertising fee. Presumably, after paying this fee, Trulia will then link the listings back to the brokers’ site and display the brokers’ company logo (i.e. C21 DBA). But, until and unless the broker ponies up, Trulia is contractually obligated (yes, Trulia and Realogy have signed a contract) to link all listings to the corporate site.
Whether this will lead to C21 or ERA collecting referral fees on leads generated from these listings (which brings up another interesting point about who owns the data, the franchisor or franchisee) is an unknown. My sense is, however, should this happen it would upset an awful lot of independently owned and operated companies who, not to be ommitted, already pay substantial royalty and advertising fees purportedly for corporate marketing efforts.
Frankly, I find this incredible. Think about this: Trulia’s brand is trumping the franchise brand, requiring payments to Trulia, and the franchise brand is trumping the brokers’ and agents’ brands, requiring payments to the franchise. At the same time, the brokers and agents in the field are building the business relationships that form the foundations of the all the brands. They’re doing all the work and they’re having to pay very dearly for lead generation that the web is supposed to be making more efficient. Efficiency for Trulia and Realogy, perhaps, but it doesn’t look very efficient for the brokers and agents.
These business models don’t work in the long run. There’s a fascinating post today on O’Reilly Radar about how Google and others, in their quest to “free” information, need to be careful not to destroy content creation. The post quotes someone quoting a Google employee on the evolution of Google’s thinking on this issue I find highly relevant to MLS today: “”Some think of Google as selling search. Some business types think it sells ads. I think it needs to be in the business of ensuring there’s something to sell ads around.” Yes, exactly. We need to protect content creation, especially the content that’s hard to create, like broad, deep and standard listing information.
Sooner or later, the brokers and agents will figure out that they are paying too much money to Trulia or their franchises for these leads and that they can do it more efficiently through cooperation. This brings me back to the MLS, back to local decisions in the best interest of all competitors. The MLS can and will figure out a way through these challenges. The specific business model for data aggregation and sharing on a broader scale may not exist yet, but the solution exists in a framework of trust allowing MLSs to foster a national non-advertising listing portal controlled by the brokers and agents.
Realty Times reports this morning that eNeighborhoods has been acquired by Dominion Enterprises, the parent company of Homes.com, Advanced Access, Number1Expert, and related homes magazine businesses. I wonder if this acquisition signals a major change in strategy for Homes.com or whether the focus will remain on broker and agent sites?
I’m not sure exactly when Homes.com beta came out but they’ve added the now ubiquitous sold data from Onboard, LLC and a neighborhoods function that’s under construction, which explains at least one potential area of synergy between Homes.com and eNeighorhoods. Homes.com seems to be wanting to make a stronger statement in the listing portal space. At the same time, how does the Homes.com portal square with eNeighborhoods’ excellent work on behalf of major franchises like RE/Max in helping them build their listing portals? Will Homes.com ever be able to bring IDX data to its web site? Could Homes.com become a Realtor.com competitor? Probably not but it’s interesting speculation.
I particularly find interesting this quote in the Realty Times piece from Peter Ill, SVP of Dominion: “We were watching technologies like paid search and realized that portals were being outflanked by Web services . . .” The recent success of Trulia and Google Base with Realogy and Prudential’s protectionism of their exclusive relationship with Yahoo! Real Estate makes me think listing portals are pretty important these days and aren’t being outflanked by much. Ill’s comment also doesn’t jive with the work they’re putting into Homes.com beta.
The question of listing portals was discussed at the Clareity conference I attended several weeks ago. In particular, the success the Houston Association of REALTORS® has had with their listing portal was highlighted. The traditional argument against MLS listing portals is that it competes with the brokers’ sites. In other words, if the MLS doesn’t have a web site, the brokers’ sites will get more traffic. This claim, however, doesn’t seem to be born out by the web traffic counts. (I wish I had a link for this but it was just presented orally during the conference. Check out the Future Vision of HAR.com on the HARtv site (requires IE, ActiveX).) What HAR found in looking at web traffic patterns for real estate searches in Houston versus Dallas, which doesn’t have a strong listing portal, is that the broker web sites didn’t get any more traffic in Dallas than they did in Houston. In other words, the existence of the HAR portal wasn’t having a negative impact. Moreover, the HAR site was driving a LOT of traffic to the listings, outpacing every other portal for the Houston market.
What was even more interesting is looking at data from the Seattle area, where John L. Scott and Windermere have spent tons of money on their listing portals and have excluded even Realtor.com from displaying listings. In other words, John L. Scott and Windermere are pretty much the only game in town, seemingly, but yet the data (again, no link, just recollection) showed that the most visited real estate site in Seattle is Craig’s List. Neither John L. Scott nor Windermere were even in the top ten. What’s that mean? I think it means that portals are critical. Consumers want to go to a site they think is independent and they don’t see the broker or franchise portals in that light.
Is this at the heart of the eNeighborhoods’ acquisition by Dominion? Only time will tell. What I do know is that I wish my good friends Greg, Dan, Andy and Dave at eNeighborhoods all the best as they make this transition. These are some of the smartest and hardest working people in the business. These guys make stuff happen and this is going to be exciting to watch.
I like to read. After I finish a book (well, a non-fiction book), I usually write up a summary for future reference or publishing on our company intranet. Now that we have this blog, though, I thought it might be interesting to post some of my summaries here, too. Here’s my first:
In Founders at Work, Jessica Livingston interviews thirty “founders” of technology startups, including Steve Wozniak of Apple, Mike Lazaridis of RIM, Blake Ross of Firefox and Paul Buchheit of gmail. Though the founders were active in many different decades and covered many different disciplines, the most fascinating aspect of the book is that there are several strong themes that are common through the interviews. Summing up, success for these founders came from:
Here are some quotes I highlighted from the interviews:
Foreword by Paul Graham: “Apparently sprinters reach their highest speed right out of the blocks, and spend the rest of the race slowing down. The winners slow down the least.” p. ix.
Steve Wozniak’s advice: “First of all, try to have the highest of ethics and to be open and truthful about things, not hiding. . . . Don’t mislead people. Know in your heart that you are a good person with good goals because that will carry over to your own self-confidence and your belief in your engineering abilities. Always seek excellence: make your product better than the average person would.” p.55.
Joe Kraus of Excite! on the ups and downs of a startup: “You never know anything. The hardest part in a startup is that you wake up one morning, and you feel great about the day, and you think, ‘We’re kicking ass.” And then you wake up the next morning, and you think ‘We’re dead.’ And literally nothing’s changed.”
Dan Bricklin of Visicalc on the value of his partnership with Bob Frankston: “Bob’s much more aggressive in many ways than I am, and I’m much more conservative. So we’re very complementary. . . . It’s like having old married couples who spat all the time, always yelling at each other. . . . arguing and stuff like that — that’s just a way of testing your own understanding of things. By arguing with others . . ., that’s how you learn. And if somebody can’t take the arguments with it, then maybe they don’t really believe in what they’re talking about and they don’t understand it well enough.” p. 87.
Mitch Kapor of Lotus: “The most important thing for me is, I don’t want to work with someone who says, ‘Just help me make the business be more successful.’ I want to work with entrepeneurs who are personally passionate, committed, and believe in what they’re doing. Not all entrepreneurs are like that. Some people may be just as happy selling canned tuna . . .” p.98.
Ray Ozzie of Lotus Notes and Groove on money: “Everyone knows that one reason you go to work and do what you do is the hope that ultimately you’ll be compensated. But you don’t have to say it, and it doesn’t have to come through. . . . It should be about how you can impact the lives of users, partners, and the employees themselves. . . . The more you focus on the things that matter when you are talking to people who want to believe in you, the more they will believe in you and the more it will be a sustainable entity.” p.110.
Evan Williams of Blogger on his biggest surprise: “How far you can get on a simple idea is amazing. I have a tendency to add more and more — the ideas always get too big to implement before they even get off the ground. Simplicity is powerful.” p. 125.
Jonathon Schacther of del.icio.us on what he’d do differently: “I would have designed the back-end architecture differently, and that would have saved a lot of work now. Scaling past one machine, one database, is very challenging . . . ” p.227.
Mark Fletcher of Bloglines: “I guess my advice is: solve a problem that you have, first and foremost, and chances are, other people may have the same problem.” p.234.
Charles Geschke of Adobe on introducing technology: “[I]f you’re only focused on the market today, by the time you introduce your solution to that problem, there’ll probably be several others already entrenched. . . . Much better to figure out where the marketplace is going to be in a few years, focus on providing a solution to that, and then let the market forces catch up to you. That’s what we did with Photoshop and it turned out to be a great decision for us . . . .” p.291.
Phillip Greenspun of ArsDigita: “People don’t like to write. It’s hard. The people who were really good software engineers were usually great writers; they had tremendous ability to organize their thoughts and communicate.” p.325.
Joel Spolsky of FogCreek on what works: “The one thing we learned over 5 years is that nothing works better than just improving your product. . . . If we had taken all the effort we put into these crazy [pricing and other marketing] schemes and put it into moving our software development schedule ahead by the equivalent amount, it would have paid off much more.” p.354.
Blake Ross of Firefox on lessons learned: “One is to make sure you are always in communication with the people who are eventually going to use your product. It’s very easy to just lock yourself in a room and code all day, and you forget what the real problems are that people are having. So you have to keep talking to people and keep refining what you are doing.” p.403.
Conclusion: Highly recommended for anyone interested in technology, business, creativity, innovation, and passion.
In my posts on Raging Regionals, I suggested that MLSs should consider focusing on the RETS 2 listing data standards as a strong step (leap) toward a distributed national repository. This suggestion set off a firestorm of commentary here and on the RETS-dev mailing list. When I wrote the posts, I was hoping to get lots of comments, but I was hoping the comments would be from MLS executives and others interested in working on the listing data standards.
Instead, the comments were from various web developers working on IDX web sites and frustrated by the complexity of RETS 1.x. For example, one of the commenters proclaimed: “It took them [the RETS working group] 8 years to half work together a standard, and now they are trying to change it? Trulia did the same thing, better, in less than 4 months.” Ahh, Trulia and Zillow and Google all make everything look so easy, just like those cover girls. They’re so pretty and wouldn’t life just be perfect if we could just hang with them? These old ball-and-chain MLS systems are so ugly and constantly nag us about what we can and can’t do, constantly holding us back. Urrgghh. I want the cover girls, who are sexy and fun and free!
Of course, all of that is missing the point. Just like the cover girls will never be your girlfriend, Google, Zillow or Trulia are not MLS systems and don’t claim to be. These are advertising systems. Here’s a snippet from Trulia’s data feed documentation:
Compare this to your local MLS system data. Does anyone notice anything missing? How about five or six hundred data elements? Is it easier to work with 15 or 20 fields than 500 or 600? Sure. But, as Trulia and others are finding out, standardizing data is not easy. Here’s a screen shot from their search page today:
Let’s see, we’ve got a couple of condo types, townhouses or apt/condo/twnhs, and an unspecified. Where do I search for condos again?
Importantly, I’m not picking on these guys. As I said, they don’t claim to be an MLS system and, in my opinion, they do an incredible job with their site. If I was a broker or agent, I’d be putting my listings on Trulia. Moreover, I suspect the data inconsistencies on their site likely come from the MLS systems that generated the listings.
No, I’m not trying to be critical, rather my objective with this post is two-fold: (1) put to rest the idea, once and for all, that advertising systems like Google, Zillow or Trulia can or should be compared to MLS systems — they shouldn’t; and (2) re-emphasize that our industry (including Google, Zillow, and Trulia) needs to focus and re-focus on listing data standards. So much has already been done on the RETS 2 listing payloads already and, as I stated before, we now need the focus to come from the outside in. We need to get exposure and buy-in from all corners of the industry, from MLSs, brokers, agents, IDX vendors, listing aggregators, etc.
I’ve been married to my wife for ten years and she still is a cover girl to me. FBS has been married to the MLS industry for over 25 years and we’re still enamored. You see, we don’t have mid-life crises around here. We’re not cutting and running for the next most beautiful thing. Is there room for improvement? Absolutely. Could the MLS systems of today be doing a better job on data standards, easy data distribution, simpler rules, better advertising sites? Absolutely. That’s the point of this conversation, to make all of our relationships stronger, together.
Robbie from over at Rain City Guide had it right in his comment, “I think the biggest problem is getting the RETS standard deployed. I think MLS vendors want to support it, IDX vendors need it, and brokers, agents, and consumers would all benefit from the lower cost of software development that it brings. The problem is that a standard that isn’t widely deployed isn’t much better than not having standards at all (or having multiple standards).”
So, who’s in?
