Where Real Estate Gets Its Dirt

C.A.R. Expo Recap

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

We then proceeded to crash a party at the House of Blues where we tried to cop as many free drink tickets as we could munster. Then we ended up having dinner with the well-traveled Simon Baker and John Hart from ListGlobally, which bills itself as “a new and innovative global marketing tool for agents and developers” (think global syndication service). We went out for drinks with them the next night since I discovered that Australians are the only ones that can keep up with me. : )

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!

Must have web apps for real estate vendors!

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.

Bev is back at it…

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)

“Workforce Resource licenses its proprietary Down Payment Resource℠ online service to professionals across the housing industry to promote awareness of, increase access to and simplify prospective homebuyers’ applications for down payment assistance programs. Using this innovative service, real estate agents, home builders, lenders and housing counselors can quickly match first-time homebuyers with available federal, state and local funding, ensuring those eligible for assistance are provided with maximum opportunities for home ownership, while they strengthen client relationships and increase sales. “

In a nut shell, it appears that they can match qualified listings to down payment assistance programs and provide tools to self-evaluate a potential homebuyer’s ability to qualify for those programs.  Awesome idea!

The first launch of Down Payment Resource℠ is Northstar MLS in Minneapolis-St. Paul, and the next customer is the implementation queue is REALTOR® Association of Miami Dade County.  According to Bev, she and the WFR team, which also includes Lloyd Graves and Warren Andrich (moonlighting?), are pretty busy demonstrating DPR to the real estate industry.

Kind of reminds me of that TV commercial of the guy who dressed in a suit with “question marks” all over who sold directories with names and numbers of “FREE Government Money”.

If the service proves reliable, it sounds like a great tool for real estate professionals and consumers alike.

If you are interested in learning more, call Bev at 520-886-0153 or email her at beverly.faull@businesscriticalconsulting.com

The Vendor and the iPad

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.

Real estate pros and the iPad

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!

MOVE puts on the white hat.

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.

Troy Rech, Super Internet Social Media Genius….

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!!

MLS vendors take note

You gotta think that instead of trying to come up with the next big feature to add, MLS vendor’s should really focus on making what they have more compelling.

Jason Steele over at Better Homes & Gardens Blog, Clean Slate, narrows in on a good example.

Top 5 Pet Peeves on MLS Listing Alert Emails

Dan Woolley to lead new "ConnectTech" Workshop at Inman Connect in San Francisco!

This is very cool, and I’m sure he is going to hate me for posting this, but my partner in crime, Dan Woolley, will be moderating a special workshop for all the real estate geeks out there.

Dan Woolley, W&R Studios Co-Founder
Dan Woolley, W&R Studios Co-Founder

We were very flattered when the folks at Inman called us about the idea. And (I might be a bit biased) but think Dan is the perfect choice to moderate this event.

The special workshop, at Inman Real Estate Connect conference in San Francisco, is called “ConnectTech”.

“ConnectTech will give CTO’s, developers, entrepreneurs and product managers an opportunity to explore innovation in a program tailored to geeks, not marketers”

Inman News also profiled Dan, where he was asked several questions about his company and new product Dwellicious. You can read the article here.

The agenda has been posted.

The workshop will be held on Wednesday, August 5, 2009, from 8AM to 3PM.

So get your geek on and join Dan for what I’m sure will be a great day!!

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