In response to my post The Future of MLS Is Now, Joshua Harris commented:
Michael, I see your point… and ask why does there have to be cooperation to have aggregation? (hey, that’s kind of fun to say) Google is aggregating w/out cooperation? Why is there this need to “play nice in the sandbox†when it comes to real estate. As if playing nice is the only way to get listings or data, which leads to consumers. I think we need a big kid to come into the “real estate sand box†and bully some of these big real estate companies around! Maybe the problem is in the word “aggregateâ€, we should begin a trend to replace aggregate with “crawlâ€.
This comment raises many good questions about search engines (like Google), deep data surfacing, copyright, and data standards. As important as these questions are, though, I’ll save them for another day, because I think there is a more fundamental question, namely, if there were no MLS aggregation of listings, what decisions would individual brokers and agents make regarding advertising listings? Put another way, without the cooperation the MLS fosters, would the competitive requirements of individual brokers and agents result in the listings being advertised in any one place or would they all choose different places? My guess is that, without some form of cooperation, competition would drive them to choose different venues, resulting in no aggregation.
Now, perhaps Google or some other entity could crawl all the broker sites, but the broker’s objective is to rise above their competition and so they aren’t likely to be amenable to simply turning control of their advertising efforts over to crawling. Competitors want more control than that. Moreover, without some standards for listing aggregation, crawling alone isn’t very effective, which is exactly why Google created Base. Listing data needs structure and structure requires standards and standards require cooperation.
This basic requirement, cooperation among competitors, is what so many revolutionaries coming to the real estate space have seemed to ignore. The DOJ, for example, in the guise of protecting competition, ignores that cooperation is required to create the asset (listings, especially those aggregated) over which everyone is now fighting. Those complaining that the listings database(s) should be opened far and wide forget that the listings are in the databases in the first place based on a very limited agreement to cooperate, which never had anything at all to do with advertising. The challenge afoot is re-defining the cooperative agreements to now include advertising, and the DOJ and other revolutionaries should be helping to preserve that cooperation instead of insisting that it isn’t necessary.
Athol’s Bad MLS Photo of the Day series may find fewer candidates once this new photo re-sizing technique becomes popular. To make a photo smaller, you used to have to either crop it or shrink it. Cropping is bad because you likely will lose important content. Shrinking is bad because everything gets really small. Now, however, there is a new technique that dynamically eliminates less important parts of the image. This is seriously cool and has very real applications for real estate photography. Check out this demo and pay close attention to the image as it re-sizes. This is amazing stuff.
I wonder if anyone in the RE.net is yet using something like DesignMyRoom for virtual staging? I haven’t tried it out myself yet, but that it allows you to upload actual photos for the base of the room is really cool.
More and more real estate multiple listing services (MLSs) are being re-named “broker exchanges” or “listing exchanges” or something similar. There are several reasons for these changes, such as wanting to distinguish themselves from the MLS organizations being attacked by the DOJ and to make clear that their MLS is for brokers only and not the consuming public.
On a slightly related note, Greg Swann writes today about wanting a new certification for the best agents, similar to Underwriter’s Laboratory. I peaked at the UL web site and was surprised to see them promoting a Mutliple Listing Service. Alas, it has nothing to do with real estate MLS. Nor does Major League Soccer. Now, not too many are going to confuse soccer and real estate, but, on the web, those terms matter. Of course, the term MLS also is a registered trademark of CREA in Canada. So, there are plenty of reasons not to invest too heavily in the term MLS.
Yet, anecdotally at least, real estate consumers in the United States today, more than ever, are familiar with the term MLS and think of it as the real estate marketplace. So, if it’s time to start thinking of moving past the term MLS to something new, there will be plenty of re-education to do.
Remarkable service exceeds expectations. More often than not, though, the service provider is in control of your expectations or at least should be. Let me give you an example.
I went to the dentist the other day after an extended absence. I was nervous about the visit but the dental assistant quickly exceeded my expectations by setting them properly. Every time she went to do anything, she succinctly and clearly explained what she was doing and why. Then she told me the result of whatever she just did. As she went on, my comfort and confidence in her and the process grew. At the end, the dentist advised that I needed a root canal. Ugggh. But, I wasn’t surprised by it nor was I upset (except perhaps with myself), because they had been constantly setting my expectations.
In contrast, when I went to get the root canal, the doctor was less forthcoming. I knew I needed a root canal but I really didn’t know exactly what was going to be happening. At each stage, my discomfort increased more and more because I wasn’t sure what was about to happen. Had this doctor just talked out loud, I think it would have been easier and better, as I would know what to expect. Occasionally, he would say something like, this is going to hurt a little, which was great, but I would have loved to know just a tad more about why.
Setting expectations is what remarkable service is all about. In today’s world of hyper-specialization, the service we get is often from professionals who live in a world of complexity about their profession, which is why we’re going to them in the first place. The true professionals, however, are those who can explain the complexity of their service simply, to anyone. If you can’t do this, that means you need to learn more about your profession. When you can communicate what you do and set expectations for your customers continually, accurately, and easily, you will find your customers remarking about how your service exceeds their expectations.
O’Reilly has a funny post today about eBooks with scratch ‘n sniff stickers for your computer so you can get that “old book smell” with your eBook. This would be great for a real estate web site, except they’d all smell like baking bread or cookies. Now, if you could get the true smells of the cat pee or cigarette smoke, that just might save a lot of frustrating visits.
Jaison Freed, FBS’s lead RETS engineer, will be on a panel for Creating a RETS Powered Broker Website at the NAR Convention in Vegas this November. All should attend to learn and ask many, many questions. Jaison will love it. Just to be sure it’s a lively event, we’re hoping to have a gaggle of people there from FBS to cheer on our co-owner. 
If there is a decision to be made about how cyberspace will grow, then that decision will be made. The only question is by whom. We can stand by and do nothing as these choices are made —by others, by those who will not simply stand by. Or we can try to imagine a world where choice can again be made collectively and responsibly,
— Lawrence Lessig, Code Version 2.0
For the past six months, I’ve been writing about the prognosticated death and life death of the MLS. Over a span of about 100 posts, I’ve suggested that:
In writing on this topic, I’ve often felt like web 2.0 and its promoters are rushing ahead of everyone, creating something new destined to destroy the MLS. The speed with which new sites and systems are developed is astonishing and that speed of change can make one feel powerless, as if caught up in a storm that can’t be controlled. Chaotic is a word that describes the feeling well.
Recently, however, I read two books that gave me an interesting perspective on this chaos that is worth sharing. First, Lawrence Lessig’s book Code v2.0, quoted above, makes clear that cyberspace requires us to make choices about our future. One of the central presmises of Lessig’s book is that software “code is law.”
I’ll undoubtedly miss some of the sophistication of this premise by summarizing it as saying that the way in which a system is designed creates the rules for engaging with that system. This is true of everything made in real space, too, but what many seem willing to overlook is that this is especially true in cyberspace. Cyberspace doesn’t exist except as humans create it. The corollary of this is that we have choices to make in creating cyberspace. Cyberspace doesn’t just spring up from nothing, we need to choose to create it and those choices rule what cyberspace is and how we interact with it and each other while there.
Lessig uses an interesting example to make the point that we have choices to make in defining cyberspace. Lessig recounts what at first appears to be a common tale of a disagreement between neighbors. One neighbor was growing poisonous plants and the other neighbor’s dog ate the plants and died, which resulted in the disagreement. The dog owner complained to the gardening neighbor, suggesting she could have grown plants that weren’t poisonous. The gardener responded that the dog owner should have chosen a dog that wouldn’t eat the plants or at least could be re-born after dying. Incredibly, the dog owner didn’t blanch at this suggestion, even though it seems completely bizarre to us. Why? Because these were neighbors in SecondLife, a completely on-line (cyberpsace) community, where you can design your own poisonous plants or dogs that do things not possible in real space. Choices. Lots of choices, in cyberspace.
Now, let’s relate this back to MLS. So much of what I’ve read and discussed with others about MLS “in cyberspace” borders on capitulation. Cyberspace exists and it’s changing or destroying the MLS, the story goes, like cyberspace is some outside force that cannot be controlled. However, that’s only true if we abdicate to others the choices of defining cyberspace for real estate, if we assume that the rules should or need to be made by the technologists or anti-trust regulators or the NAR or someone else other than us.
It’s also tempting to think that cyberspace for real estate is already defined, but it isn’t. Not by a long shot. In fact, cyberspace isn’t defined for much of anything. Seriously. Sure, the web has been evolving for the better part of ten years, and it seems ubiquitous now, a thing or blob that’s just here, there, everywhere. But the truth is that everything about the web and cyberspace generally is just now being defined.
Perhaps the best example is the shift from anonymity to identity occurring right now. In the early days, the wonder of cyberspace was tied closely to the fact that you could be anyone or no one or many people, all that the same time. This anonymity or pseuodonymity, as the case may be, promised freedom to many. Freedom to be someone they were not, such as not this sex or that race, or ugly or fat, or a CEO or a mail worker or anything else they are.
The rise of social networks over the last several years, however, has shifted the focus away from anonymity to “who are you”? First, kids were posting the most intimate details of their lives to their MySpace or Xanga pages and then college students were posting privately to their friends on Facebook, and now business people are trying to figure out how to network on LinkedIn or Facebook or Zillow or Trulia or any of the other many broad or targeted social networking sites. What’s common about all of these sites is that they all have a “profile” of each user and it’s that profile or identity that’s being shared with everyone. For many, the profiles on these sites are who they are.
Think about this for a minute. Facebook has many ways for you to describe yourself. You can share your music, photos, writings, videos and more. But there is a limit. Even though Facebook has opened up its system to allow others to add applications to it, there still is a limit to what can be shared. For those who tie their identity into the social network, those limits constrain who they can be. The limits of the system limit the participants. This was one of the points Lessig is trying to make when he says code is law. Put another way, code constrains or regulates.
So, who is making the rules? Maybe it’s Facebook or maybe it’s Zillow or Trulia or Realtor.com or some other site you’re working on right now. But maybe the rules are just being written or constantly re-written. That’s what I think. Here’s an example from just a few days ago. Brad Fitzpatrick, a 27 year old who helped create LiveJournal, is promoting an idea to standardize the “social graph”, because, in Mr. Fitzpatrick’s words, “People are getting sick of registering and re-declaring their friends on every site., but also: Developing “Social Applications” is too much work.” Brad wants the social network to be portable and not tied into the silos of Facebook or the other social network sites, one of which, LiveJournal, Mr. Fitzpatrick helped create. Here’s more:
While Facebook is an amazing platform and has some amazing technology, there’s a lot of hesitation in the developer / “Web 2.0″ community about being slaves to Facebook, dependent on their continued goodwill, availability, future owners, not changing the rules, etc. That hesitation I think is well-founded. A centralized “owner” of the social graph is bad for the Internet.
Does this sound familiar, sort of like the debate over access to listing data and who can do what with it? But here’s the deal: Mr. Fitzpatrick understands that the world in which he’s living is definable. The rules are not yet written.
Standards are just now being defined for all that matters. Until now, the standards that were being defined were for things like HTML, TCP/IP and other important parts of the Internet and web. But those things are all generic or abstract at a level mostly interesting to technologists. Now, however, what’s being defined are things like who you can be and what you can do with your data and who you can talk to and what you can say or share with them. This is where it gets interesting for you and everyone.
Back to the MLS. The RETS community has been working hard to define standards for exchanging MLS data, including defining what the data should look like. This is the meat as well as the potatoes for the future of MLS. Anyone with interest in real estate should be engaged with the RETS process at some level. More importantly, I think the to-be-formed Real Estate Standards Organization (RESO) has an opportunity to create conversations far beyond the core of listing definitions and data exchange.
One of the areas that needs to be explored is what does being a “member” of the MLS mean, especially in cyberspace. This goes to the core of the MLS portal question. What does it mean to have an MLS portal? Who gets access? What can they do when they get there? Who can they talk to? What are the rules? As noted above, these questions will be answered, the question is who will be answering them and how. I’m suggesting that now is the time for the current MLSs and their members to engage these issues squarely and openly and rationally.
This conclusion — that now is the time to engage these issues, like never before or after — leads directly to the other important book I read recently, The Summer of 1787: The Men Who Invented the Constitution by David O. Stewart. What amazed me most about the recounting of the Constitutional Convention by Mr. Stewart was that the convention lasted nearly four months, with many delegates coming and going throughout that time, and many others staying the entire time.
So, in many ways, the fame of our founders is due to the fact that they were there. They showed up at the time that mattered. On the other hand, the Convention likely would not have been a success had just anyone showed up. From beginning to end, George Washington was there, silent as the leader most of the time, but there, lending legitimacy and urgency and importance to the affair. Many others, Wilson, Rutledge, Madison and Mason, may have had a more direct hand in writing or crafting the Constitution, but it would have been for naught had Washington not been there, too. Everyone played a critical role in the process, with small states battling large states, slave states battling free, farmers battling shippers, and more.
Certainly there were significant compromises in the Consitution (notably slavery) that were poorly reasoned, but the beauty of the remainder of the document is the result of a hard clash of reason. These men discussed the issues of representation, the presidency, the courts, and state rights for months. Very little was just pushed aside. The issues were explored at length. Lessig makes this point, too:
There is a magic in a process where reasons count—not where experts rule or where only smart people have the vote, but where power is set in the face of reason. The magic is in a process where citizens give reasons and understand that power is constrained by these reasons.
My question is, when is the Constitutional Convention for the MLSs going to occur? I attend conference after conference that last two days, at most. Then there may be some calls in between that last an hour or two. This isn’t going to cut it. The questions facing our industry to define the rules of real estate in cyberspace are too difficult to resolve in a few days. We need the clash of the big and small brokers and MLSs, the regulators (NAR and the DOJ), the technologists (vendors of all kinds) and others to participate in this process on a meaningful level. Of course, today, such a convention doesn’t have to occur in real space, but rather can occur in cyberspace. The important point is that the convention occur. That we engage the questions, seriously and deliberatively. Now.
There’s a lot of news to report from the RETS meetings in Chicago. First, there were tons of new faces this meeting. Usually, there are around 50-75 participants but there were over 120 this meeting, due to some excellent promotion by Gregg Larson and Matt Cohen, who are heading up the marketing work group. Kristen Carr also has been recruiting other MLSs to attend, and her efforts appear to be paying off well, as many of the new participants were from MLSs.
I’m also pleased to report that the new governance proposal submitted by the governance work group was approved today by the RETS community. In addition, the community voted to have the current governance work group act as an interim board to get the process started. Our first goal is to establish, by September 15, a process for the membership to nominate a slate of potential directors, with the goal of having the slate finalized for the December meeting in Miami.
There were several other motions passed, including the approval of the payloads (data definitions) for person, member, team, participant and office. The approval of these defintions is good validation of the work of the schema work group, being led by Paul Stusiak. The work group has been meeting once a month for the last three months to hash out the details of these data definitions and it’s great to see that hard work validated. It’s amazing how complicated something like team definitions can be, and the work is likely to get more difficult as we turn to listings and property definitions but the objective still is to have those payloads ready for voting at the December meeting in Miami.
The community also voted to open RETS version 1.7 to change proposals, with the aim of creating verison 1.8. This is the result of the vision Mark Lesswing (NAR’s CTO) articulated last spring in Austin to create a family of standards, supporting both the strong progress of RETS 2 while also supporting 1.x. Furthering this goal, the community approved a proposal by Chris McKeever to make clear that the payloads, though previously referred to as RETS 2 schema, really are independent of RETS 2 and could be delivered as part of an existing RETS server, too, or used for any other purpose. The schema provide standard listing definitions and that work can be used in many, many ways, not just as part of RETS 2.
There certainly was much more, but I’m too tired to write more. I’m taking vacation next week, but may write a bit. I’ve got a post stewing about how the switch on the web from anonymity to identity will broadly impact the MLS and MLS systems, and I’d love to be able to get it out soon. The priority next week, though, is going to be relaxing with my family.
The recommendation of the RETS governance work group was posted yesterday to RETS.org. This recommendation for a new Real Estate Standards Organization (RESO) is a culmination of the work of Gregg Petch, Peter Spicer, Matt McGuire, Ryan Bonham, Mark Lesswing and me. I was honored to work with this group, and I’m proud of what we produced. Our meetings and conference calls over the last several months were productive, professional, and even enjoyable.
Speaking for myself, I believe the RESO recommendation accomplishes the core objectives I had for the governance plan:
The recommendation will be reviewed and submitted for a vote this Thursday at the RETS meetings in Chicago.
