There are two upcoming events that if you haven’t already heard about you should definitely check out:

October 31st, 2011
CMLS Brings It – The Impact of the Proposed IDX Rule Changes
Online Meeting regarding the NAR PAG Report on IDX from all angles and share your thoughts with your peers. Hosted by CMLS and featuring Bob Bemis, ARMLS; Matt Cohen, Clareity Consulting; Jim Harrison, MLS Listings; John Rees, Esq.; Greg Manship, Intermountain MLS; Cathy Holefelder, Heartland MLS and other invited guests, this WebEx will lay out the possible rule changes and the impact on MLSs.

November 9th, 2011
CMLS Brings It to the Table- Branding the MLS
CMLS is bringing another timely topic to the Table at NAR’s Annual Conference- Join us as we explore the Challenges and Opportunities for the MLS industry as regards Branding the MLS Data to reflect Value and Accuracy in the marketplace.

With CMLS coming up next week at NAR just around the corner I thought I would share some travel tips. Just click on the images to see them better. Here goes…

So I hate to check any luggage. Especially with connections, you are just asking for trouble. I was reading this blog (onebag.com) It’s all about how to travel light. Anyway this company (RED OXX) worked with the blogger to create the ultimate carry on bag, they call it the AIR BOSS. One of the “onebag” concepts is no wheels. The mechanism for the wheels in rolling bags take up too much space. At first that was a deal breaker for me but the site convinced that you aren’t really carry the bag that much anyway. I got the bag and it’s great. I have no problem going on week long trips with this sucker, the design is simple and the quality of the bag is top notch, I love it. Problem was that I noticed that I was carrying the bag a lot longer than I wanted to, I missed wheels. But I didn’t want to sacrifice the bag. I needed another solution.

The best of both worlds

I typically ride me bike to work, so I use a backpack. When I travel I use the same backpack to carry by MacBook and other gear. Some of our sales guys use a rolling wheel case. I thought this might be the perfect solution for when I travel. I bought a Wenger Swissgear wheeled case from Amazon. The case was wide enough for all my gear and as an added bonus just fit my AIR BOSS bag on top. So now I could keep my AIR BOSS bag, have wheels and still not check any baggage.

Shoes and belt

When doing trade shows you really stand a lot so comfortable shoes are key. Rubber soles are a must. Normally I rock my Allen Edmonds but these are not for booth duty. So about 8 years ago, on a recommendation, I bought a pair of Mephisto shoes. They were a bit pricey but are awesome! Another tip, buy a reversible belt. You’re welcome.

Gear
You never know when you are going to need that extra power. So I like the integrated extention cord/ multi-outlet strip. They carry these at any hardware store. I also use at Fivespot for wireless internet, since I usually have multiple devices (MacBook Pro, iPad, iPhone, etc). One thing I recently got for my iPad and love is the Book Book by Twelve South. I’m still using my original iPad so I don’t have a smartcover, but even if I upgrade I think I’ll still keep the Book Book.

Last but not least is headsets. I have the QuietComfort 15 (Noise Canceling). I prefer “over the ear”, rather than “on ear” to baffle out as much noise as I can. I also spent a few extra bucks and bought the “OE headphones mobile communications kit” which basically adds a microphone so you can use your phone/Skype with them. This makes them perfect for conference calls.

Hope you enjoyed this and travel safe!

“Buzzword Bingo HD is a free iPad game that mocks those who believe authentic interactions start with empty words.”

I wanted to share a few thoughts and observations about the C.A.R. Expo held at the Anaheim Convention Center last week. The event was fantastic. Good attendance and, at least from my experience, real estate agents were buying.

I barely had time to recover from CMLS 2010 in Chicago when we rolled in and set up our booth on Tuesday. There was a lot of “haven’t seen you in a long time” sarcasm from a lot of the vendors.

Opening day they billed as “Tech Tuesday” and the show floor was open from 5PM to 8PM. Of the 70 orders we took during the show we did over 10 on Tuesday so I was a nice start.

Simon Baker

Now back to the show….

Although I’ve seen the C.A.R. shows have lots more exhibitors the overall attendance was good. The Orange County Register had an article about the show you can read here, 1 and includes lots of photos.

I saw some interesting booths and products. One of the clever things I saw was at the Discover MLS booth. They were using a special display overlay device on an iMac to demo their MLS product. I took out my iPhone and shot this quick video.

I went to the MLS committee meeting hoping to catch the calREDD update. But had to leave early since the other topics took up a lot of time. But it doesn’t sound like I missed much. From what I was told Art Carter‘s update was less than 5 minutes.

Oh what a difference a year makes!

I thought I would share with you my top web apps for real estate vendors.  I use all of these myself and are worth taking a look at yourself.

TripIt is a great app to keep track of your travel.  You simply forward your e-mail travel confirmation e-mails (air and hotel) to plan@tripit.com and it parses each e-mail and gives you an easy to read format to help you keep track of all your travel plans.  The app is free (they also have a “pro” version.  You can also choose to share your trips with others (or keep trips private) to see who else is coming to the next conference or trade show.  They also have a great iPhone app (as well as Blackberry).

Expensify is a great app to help you create expense reports.  Their tagline is “Expense Reports That Don’t Suck!”.  You can link your credit card to transfer expenses digitally or use the camera on your phone or e-mail to track receipts.  This is also a free app and has great iPhone and other mobile native apps too.

Tired of showing up to a training or office meeting and wondering if anyone will show?  Eventbrite is a great tool to set up quick landing pages for events and track attendees.  It will also send out reminder e-mail to attendees 48 hours before the event starts.  It has a great iPhone app that allows you to check in attendees at the event.  And since you can capture contact information at sign up there is no need to collect business cards, you will have all contact info on your attendees for follow up.  This is also free app.

So these are my top 3, it would be great to hear from anyone else who can add to the list.

Beverly Faull

I had a chance to talk with Beverly Faull a couple of weeks ago to get caught up on what she’s working on.  As many of you know, Bev has been in the industry for a long time and was once the CEO of NTREIS and most recently ran the MLS division for FNRES, now LPS Real Estate Group.  Bev has her own consulting company now, Business Critical Consulting, LLC (BCC), and she has recently been focusing on a client, Workforce Resource (WFR), which provides a product  called Down Payment  Resource ℠ (DPR).   According to the WFR website (workforce-resource.com)

The Vendor and the iPad

This is part II of my thoughts about the iPad and real estate.  You can read my first post on W&R Studios‘ blog Lightning|Twice = >The Realtor and the iPad

Seems like there are a lot of people on both sides of the argument of whether the iPad will have any impact on real estate.

One thing I agree with is that MLS systems are pretty much DOA for the iPad. A lot of today’s MLS systems require Internet Explorer and don’t work well (or at all) with other browsers.

The future doesn’t look bright either, since most MLS Vendors, to solve their browser compatibility issues,  are running to platforms like Adobe’s FLEX or Microsoft’s Silverlight.  And as we all know by now Apple doesn’t like Flash, much less anything from Microsoft.  ( One interesting side note is that FBS’ MLS System, with its ironically named “flex” MLS isn’t jumping on the Flash bandwagon.)

But lets look at the iPad as a sales tool for Vendors.  I think of it as a mini projector.  Something you can hold in your hands that you can easily demo a web app or run a slide show.  Think about a trade show floor, where your space is limited, now every person is essentially a “demo station”.  Or at a broker preview meeting, where you are causally meeting groups of Realtors, now you can just carry it around like a sales binder.

Or how about taking orders?  A recent startup called Square announced an easy way to accept credit card and Paypal payments via an iPhone.  So this seems that it will easily translate to the iPad  Check out this short video about their service.

One danger here that I said I would mention in my previous post is that the device itself might outshine your product.  Meaning you might end up answering more questions about your iPad than your product.  I believe this will be short lived as the iPad and iPad like devices become more mainstream.

I would be interested in hearing your thoughts about how you might use the iPad as a sales device.  It will be interesting to see how many iPads we see at NAR Midyear and the other trade shows and conferences coming in 2010.

I’m writing two posts focused on Apple’s iPad.  The first part is on W&R Studios‘ blog, Lightning | Twice entitled: The Realtor and the iPad.  Later this week I will be posting the second part of this post here on Vendor Alley entitled; “The real estate vendor and the iPad”.  So stay tuned!

Recently I wrote a post about “What’s MOVE’s next move?”.  The following week Curt Beardsley, a VP at MOVE,  did a lot of demos to news and industry people about what they’ve been working on.  My business partner Dan Woolley and I were lucky enough to get a demo.

Curt Beardsley, VP of Product Marketing -MOVE.COM

Dan and I have known Curt for quite a long time.  In a nutshell Curt’s first company, True North Technology created the first web-based MLS system.  Yup, that’s right he invented the internet based MLS system, take that Al Gore!!  They were bought by GTE Enterprise Solutions, creators of T-III, which is where he met a guy named Errol Samuelson.  Errol now is the president of Realtor.com.

Anyway we were lucky enough to  get a demo of new tool for real estate professionals they call, “Find“.

The first thing I have to say about Find is that its freaking awesome! The way it blends public records data, MLS data, on the fly heat mapping, and pychographic data just blows your mind.  But MOVE figured out that the key to understand this data is centered around the way you search.  You might even say that you need to make sure you can “FIND” what you are looking for!  I’ve seen other sites/products that try to pull off the natural language searching and most have failed.  Find nails it.

Find is intuitive, fast and as a software developer inspiring.

But the technology is only half the story.  It’s up in about 40 MLS providers around the country and it’s free to REALTORS. The only catch is MOVE would like MLS providers to provide their sold data to MOVE.com to implement the solution.

And what does MOVE what to do with this sold data?  Sell it to direct marketers?  No.  Use it to build AVMs?  Nope.  Slice and dice the data and create derivative products for the mortgage industry?  Not even close.

Here’s what they want to do:

Improve the consumer search experience on Realtor.com.

That’s it!  In a nutshell, make the National Association of REALTORS flagship site, Realtor.com, (already #1) even better.  I’m surprised that more people aren’t writing about this.

In the past the industry has been pretty vocal about what it doesn’t like about Realtor.com.  I’m sure that there will still be a lot of Realtor.com “haters” out there, but with all the hype around MLS data it’s refreshing to see a company who is focused on improving their service and creating new tools that give real estate professionals back the edge. And that’s definitely something I agree with.

It’s rare when I see an idea that strikes me as so utterly brilliant and clever that I can only stop and stare at my computer screen in awe. But industry vet Troy Rech has done just that, a mashup that has brought together the hive mind that is the RE.net, waiting for your next flight, and an ordinary mobile phone with a camera.

Troy Rech, Father of ACoW

Prepare to waste the next 15 minutes of your life.

Behold….

Airport Carpets of The World!!

View Larger Map