Inman News published an in-depth paper from Cameron Paine, CEO of the Connecticut MLS, advocating consolidation to statewide MLSs. I agree with many of the arguments and claims made in the paper, but I disagree that statewide MLSs are the best solution. Instead, as I’ve long advocated here on the FBS Blog, the best solution is a national data standard that allows for innovation and competition at every level by every MLS, franchise, broker, agent, and software developer.
My primary question at this point is whether consolidation is the only path to data standards. The whitepaper states, “Politics is the single greatest barrier to the advancement of MLS consolidation.” There’s a grain of truth in this statement, and it applies to forming data standards as well. At the same time, creating statewide MLSs without first addressing data standards would only seem to exacerbate the current problems by making the political entities stronger. It is in this regard that statewide MLSs are too small. The best data standard is one without borders, not one constrained to state boundaries.
With a national (or broader) real estate data standard, software developers would have a much better chance of writing software that could be sold to all the agents in the country instead of just those in one state at a time. By creating a bigger opportunity for software developers, the competition increases and the options to agents, brokers and franchises increases commensurately.
In addition to being too small, statewide MLSs also are too big. As the whitepaper points out, politics is one of the biggest problems, and making MLSs even bigger (other than through market forces) will just exacerbate the politics. Having 50 statewide data formats may be perceived to be an improvement, but not if it prevents a national standard. The whitepaper points out that some brokers don’t have a choice of MLS software, but the choices become even less with statewide MLSs.
No, statewide MLSs are not the answer. What is the answer is developing national data standards that can promote a platform on which competition and innovation can be fostered. Only the market can determine the best size of each MLS, but the market needs to be able to work and so leaders like CTMLS should focus on creating a platform for competition instead of trying to button-hole data into statewide MLSs.
For some time, FBS has had a report in our flexmls Web system called the Listing Activity Report. This report provides listing agents and their sellers information on how often their listing is being viewed:
The report also shows:
This is all great information but a big gap on the report has been information about where and how often the listing is being viewed outside the flexmls ecosystem.
Spurred on by a suggestion on the John Hall Blog (check out this post for a good overview of the Listing Activity Report), James Ridley and David Kerzman from FBS set up a listing tracking API (application programming interface) to allow third parties to submit data from their system to the Listing Activity Report. Once James had the API working, we contacted Justin LaJoie, CEO of Diverse Solutions, which provides an IDX system to several of our clients, to see if he’d be interested in submitting hit data from their system to the Listing Activity Report. Justin was gracious to respond to the request and put a developer on the project, which took just a few hours, and so our Listing Activity Report is now showing view activity data from the Diverse Solutions IDX system as shown in the report sample below (note that the activity data for Diverse is lower just because they just started sending in the data).
Though Justin and Diverse Solutions are a competitor of ours in the IDX world, we believe the listing agents and sellers will benefit from having this data available to them directly through the MLS system. We’re also hopeful other companies will provide hit data so they, too, can be included on this report. We think it will benefit them to be on the report and, most importantly, it will benefit the listing agents and sellers, because they’ll have more information about how their listing is faring on the web.
We’ll be contacting other companies to see if they’re interested in participating but please let us know if you’re interested in getting your listing view information on the listing activity report, and we’ll get you set up!
Lastly, if you’re an MLS, we encourage you to ask any of vendors receiving your listing data to participate in this program so that your members have easy access to the listing activity data right through the MLS system.
We’ve long understood the benefit of great photos for consumers and agents viewing listings, which is why flexmls Web allows an unlimited number of high-resolution photos per listing. Sometimes the features of the property are so compelling, however, that calling them out with a good description helps the customer appreciate the photo even more.
To that end, we’ve increased the size of the photo descriptions in flexmls Web to 1,000 characters. The photo descriptions show at the top of the photo on the photos tab and will now expand and collapse to show all of the text. So, desribe the type of flooring or countertops or window shades and other features that make the home distinct. Bring the power of the keyboard to supplement your photos and make your photos truly tell a story.
Thanks to Greg Swann for letting me use one of his photos and descriptions.
