Where Real Estate Gets Its Dirt

Z2K

Well I just got back from AEI 2015, held in Vancouver B.C. Beautiful city and those Canadians are a pleasant bunch. The meetings are still going on and I had a great time catching up with everyone. And of course the main topic on everyone’s mind was the Zillow-Trulia-ListHub listings kerfuffle. Lots of activity and discussion happening in this area especially since the court bitch-slapped Trulia. In a ruling that Move commented they were “extremely pleased and delighted with the court’s ruling” and had agreed to the new cutoff date.” I’ll say.

April 7th is the new date for both Trulia and Zillow. I was kibitzing with a few other vendors who commented that it kind of felt like the hysteria back in 2000, dubbed “Y2K”. Of course in this scenario its more like “Z2K“. : )

But Zillow isn’t satisfied with just the listing data. They appear to want to win the hearts and minds of MLS providers. And that appears to be the aim of its next “invite only” event being held in Las Vegas. Zillow is footing the bill for travel and airfare of some of the most influential MLS executives in the industry. “Vegas Baby!”

Speaking of MLS providers, Zillow Group just announced a list of 18 new MLS providers that have signed direct feed agreements. And there are a few biggies.

“New partners include:

Alaska MLS – Anchorage, Alaska
California Regional Multiple Listing Service, Inc. – Los Angeles, Calif.
Golden Isles Association of REALTORS® – Brunswick, Ga.
Greater Lansing Association of REALTORS – Greater Lansing, Mich.
Greater Las Vegas Association of REALTORS – Las Vegas, Nev.
Gulf Coast MLS – Mobile, Ala.
MIBOR Service Corporation – Indianapolis, Ind.
Middle Georgia MLS – Macon, Ga.
North Central Mississippi Realtors – Oxford, Miss.
North Carolina Mountains MLS – Fletcher, NC
Northern New England Real Estate Network– Concord, NH
Northwest Mississippi Association of REALTORS – Nesbit, Miss.
Russellville BOR – Russellville, Ark.
Santa Fe Association of REALTORS Inc. – Santa Fe, NM
South Central Board of REALTORS – Rolla, Mo.
Tillamook County MLS – Tillamook, Ore.
Western Arizona Realtors Data Exchange – Lake Havasu City, Ariz.
West Central Association of Realtors MN – Willmar, Minn.”

This is a much better list that the previously announced on March 4th, which was kind of a joke.

Who else is tired of all this drama?? The feeling I get from other vendors is they can’t wait till April 8th (but I have the feeling we are only getting started). All this Zillow Group stuff is clogging up THEIR deal pipeline. Amen to that.

What does the modem say?

Love this super geeky post about what the sounds mean during a modem handshake.

The sound of the dialup, pictured

“As many already know, what you’re hearing is often called a handshake, the start of a telephone conversation between two modems. The modems are trying to find a common language and determine the weaknesses of the telephone channel originally meant for human speech. Below is a spectrogram of the handshake audio. I’ve labeled some signals according to which party transmitted them, and also put a concise explanation…

Remember when a 57K modem was the shit??

Ann Bailey’s side gig

This kind of blew me away.

Inman News did a short profile on Ann Bailey and the work she does outside of the industry. Inspiring.

201bfdeYou know what would be really cool? We all go over to their website and throw a few bucks their way. C’mon people, lets end this week feeling good.

Vendor Alley is in for $500. Who’s with me??

Click here to donate => Ashland Home

What’s a ZMA?

Glad you asked….

http://ztc.cloudcma.com

Clareity MLS Executive Workshop highlights 2015

A few things I wanted to highlight about last week’s Clareity MLS Executive Workshop in Scottsdale, AZ last week. First off Gregg and his entire team did an amazing job. The content was fantastic and they managed to keep the conversation above the salacious syndication war between MOVE and Zillow Group narrative that has been floating around.

But, one of my takeaways about the Zillow Vs MOVE thing was how it effects other players, notably Homes.com. Seems like an opportunity for these guys. When I asked Andy Woolley, now Industry Relations at Homes.com. Andy was quick to point out that while they don’t, and won’t possibly ever have as much traffic as ZTR, they were focusing a lot on “quality”. Meaning the “quality” of leads coming through Homes.com. I was sent a screen shot of a ListHub report (from the Houston market) that seemed to prove that out.

Homes.com lead ratio

Yes, I know their total detail views is much smaller, but their lead ratio is crazy good.

HAR .08%
Zillow .06%
realtor.com .03%
Trulia .019%
Homes.com .97%

The other thing was the direct feed count. Check out this slide.

Direct Feed Count

Homes.com has 400 direct feeds from MLS providers. 400 freaking hundred. Zillow Group isn’t even close. Great lead ratio, huge direct feed count, you gotta wonder what that is worth to someone.

On another topic, was the release of the MLS Satisfaction survey. Here’s the results of the “End User Satisfaction.”

MLS Satisfaction Survey

Looking at MLS Vendors with more than 2 customers it appears that Black Knight and FBS still dominate the top two spots above their competition. Kudos to both of them.

Thanks again to Gregg, Matt and the rest of the Clareity team. We are always thrilled to participate. And I hope you enjoyed the Cloud Streams t-shirts. They look great!

Follow the money

“This data is a gold!”
“We’ll package this up and sell it to Wall Street and make a fortune!”
“Just give us your data and you won’t have to pay a thing!”
“Big data! Big data! Big data!”

I’ve heard various versions of the above statements made many many times in this industry. But in all those years there doesn’t seem to be much to back it up.

Andrea Brambila at Inman News recently did an article on Analytics providers tracking most US home sales through MLSs

She highlights RPR and CoreLogic’s InfoNet. CoreLogic does put out some real numbers, they say that their revenue share split exceeded 1 million dollars last year. Which is decent, but not really living up to the hype.

And then there’s this gem.

“In May, NAR’s board of directors voted to dip into reserves to boost spending on RPR to $21.9 million a year for the next three years, partially in order to support the release of RPR mobile apps. Between 2009 and 2014, NAR spent a total $98.9 million on RPR, an amount that is projected to rise to $120.8 million by the end of 2015 and $142.7 million by the end of 2016.

In the four years since its launch, RPR has struggled to make money, generating a total of $586,270 in revenue from data analytics as of December 2013.”

Funny how you never see that info on the “Realtors Property Resource CEO Update”.

REach is looking for a few good women

Reach ™ | Accelerating Real Estate

“We have decided to extend our final application deadline to March 15 and we have a special favor to ask you: of the hundreds of companies that applied for REach 2015, one noticeable group of applicants was missing: women! Only two female-led companies applied. “

This is legit. If you are or know of anyone give Constance at NAR’s Second Century Ventures a call.

Mike and Mitch’s plan out of this mess, at least for now…

Change the game

“The goal of Stopgap Agreement is to give MLSs a reasonable amount of time to make reasoned decisions on their timeline; not Zillow Group’s or Move’s timeline. The agreement would be between the MLS and Zillow Group to keep data flowing in an interim period. Each MLS in consultation with their attorney can decide whether it makes sense for them. It’s still an individual choice”

I love this idea. Does anyone have any update on the progress of this?

Looking for a new gig?

Lots of new job postings on the Vendor Alley Job Board

Black Knight
Project Manager – Real Estate Software Products

Homespotter
Market Development Representative

Down Payment Resource
Account Manager

W&R Studios
Lead Web Designer

Move, Inc.
Director of Industry Marketing

and a few more….

See them all now.

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