Check out the press release at the bottom of this post:
If I understand this correctly the MLS division is no longer called FNRES anymore. They will now be now known as LPS Real Estate Group. Or maybe just LPS. And it looks like Cyberhomes becomes more of a product name, not known as a division name as previously.
(You gotta wonder whether or not these guys order a full box of business cards!)
“LiPS” is a good name, since you have to kiss so much ass in this industry! ; )
Good luck to Jay Gaskill, John Hensley and Marty Frame.
Lender Processing Services Announces Formation of LPS Real Estate Group
from Acquisition of FNRES Holdings and Cyberhomes, LLC
New LPS Division to Provide Powerful Tools, Data and Content to the Real Estate Industry
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – June 30, 2009 – Lender Processing Services, Inc. (NYSE: LPS), a leading provider of integrated technology and services to the mortgage and real estate industries, today announced the formation of the LPS Real Estate Group. The new division was created as a result of the acquisition and rebranding of the businesses comprising FNRES Holdings, Inc., which includes two primary businesses: FNRES MLS and Cyberhomes, LLC.
The LPS Real Estate Group will include the LPS businesses that support the real estate market, including services and solutions for Multiple Listing Services and associations, franchisors, brokers, settlement services providers, agents, lenders and media technology companies. These businesses include innovative tools such as Paragon;™ the reInsight™ collection; rDesk® Website, Broker Suites, rDesk® IDX; TransactionPoint®; DocCentral; Cyberhomes, the Cyberhomes Real Estate Advertising Network that generates revenue for its publishers; as well as a robust real estate property and tax database that includes 285 million residential and commercial property, ownership, sales, assessment and mortgage records. The current executive management team for FNRES Holdings will continue to lead the LPS Real Estate Group division.
“The proliferation of the Internet, the advent of new technologies and challenging market conditions have created a new age in the real estate market,” said LPS Real Estate Group President Jay Gaskill. “We are excited that this new LPS division will provide capabilities to anticipate the evolving needs of our customers and to deliver exciting new solution sets for their immediate and long-term benefit.”
The LPS Real Estate Group has relationships with more than 300 MLS organizations and many of the nation’s largest brokers and settlement services companies and the division’s businesses provide technology applications and data to more than 350,000 real estate professionals.
According to Gaskill, “There are a few themes that seem to resonate with our business clients. First, everyone is looking for new ways to generate revenue. Second, real estate agents are looking for tools and content to help them increase the value of their services and offer additional value-added services to consumers, who are becoming more self-sufficient. Finally, everyone is looking for ways to reduce operating costs. The depth and breadth of the LPS Real Estate Group’s tools and services will enable us to deliver on these critical customer needs by empowering our partners in the real estate industry.”
More information on the LPS Real Estate Group can be found at www.lpsreg.com.
Marc Davison from 1000Watt Consulting has a new post on Inman today…
From Part I of “New brokerage model: from bust to boom”
“Your attempt to attain future brokerage status will drown in the bong water if all you do is slap up a new site on WordPress, bang out a few blogs, recruit a few more top producers at 93/7 or lease a bistro like retail space sandwiched between Hugo Boss and Mac Cosmetics on Luxury Ave.”
Property Portal Watch has kindly posted an article I’ve written about the future of real estate search.
Here’s an excerpt…
“Everyone loves talking about real estate. But before you can share this information with everyone (Facebook, Twitter, etc) having all your favorites in one place is key. Bringing that off-line conversation on-line could bring the whole concept of “crowd sourcing” real estate search to reality.”
I just heard that OnBoard has closed or is closing it’s Ft. Lauderdale offices. The status of the employees at that office is unknown at this time.
The Ft. Lauderdale team was primarily responsible for building an IDX aggregation system and had developers who were also working on their fabled Lifestyle Search Engine (LSE). Many of the Ft. Lauderdale team members were former eNeighborhoods employees. eNeighborhoods currently handles IDX services for remax.com, coldwellbanker.com, century21.com, and era.com.
This is in concert with the news that OnBoard has entered a “strategic partnership” with Cyberhomes. Which states “Onboard Informatics has chosen Cyberhomes as its MLS listings feed aggregation partner. ”
So if I’m reading the tea leaves correctly OnBoard decided that it was easier to buy than build this technology. The move also comes on the heels of the “departure” of Rob Hahn.
Seems like OnBoard is scrambling. It was always puzzling to me why they wanted to build a national IDX aggregation system from scratch. I’m sure they found out quick that it’s not so easy.
The bigger question is the fate of the employees they hired to implement their strategic mistake.
In my recent post I pondered what the latest announcement from calREDD meant to the continuing saga of its quest to become the statewide MLS solution for California. This generated quite a bit of discussion online and offline.
So here’s a few predictions/statements:
calREDD as single statewide MLS solution is dead.
They can put any spin they want on it, but their state wide iniative is DOA. In fact after all the grandstanding there is a big question mark right now if calREDD even qualifies as an MLS.
CARETS will to continue to grow.
I wouldn’t be surprised to hear more and more MLS providers join CARETS. I wouldn’t be surprised if some announcements will be made shortly.
calREDD will solider on as a solution for smaller associations in the state, and ultimately fail.
If C.A.R. thinks that the existing MLS vendors will not fight to keep their customers then they REALLY don’t understand the MLS business.
I’m not a professional reviewer but due to my past gig and since launching Dwellicious, a social bookmarking site that works with all the major real estate search portals, I’ve become somewhat of a “connoisseur” of these types of websites.
Both RE/MAX and Roost have basically the same model/approach to displaying listings on their websites. RE/MAX International is a huge real estate franchise (not a broker), and therefore runs remax.com as a “network of broker IDX websites”, while Roost.com runs “a real estate search site that features multiple listing service-based property listings information shared through partner brokers.”
The big news is that they both have launched new site designs. It’s very interesting to see how each company approaches the way in which they display the listing content.
It’s as if you put a team of creative and talented people in one room with a certain task and another team of creative and talented people in another room with the same task. Now, months later, they come out of each of their respective rooms and gave you a demo of how they solved the problem. In this case, the problem was to create a new user interface to display broker IDX sites connecting thru a “wrapper” site.
As many of you know, I was part of the team that helped launch the first version of remax.com’s network of broker IDX sites. It was one of the best times I have had in my career. We were doing something so new and innovative and really had a national stage. So, it’s great to see what new things the eNeighborhoods and RE/MAX (and their design partner) teams have added.
With that said, here are my quick thoughts about each site:
Home Page
Remax.com
The overall design is more a conservative approach. It has a much lighter feel (lots of white space, good!) than the darker blue that covered the previous site. The addition of the one line search field on top is great, it helps balance all the self promotion (“Top Ten…”, “Become A…”, “Find A…”) going on below. I like the addition of the video upfront, but I am confused by the “Popular Searched Real Estate Markets”, it seems like they are trying too hard here.
Roost.com
Very inviting. Although the layout might be better for SEO considerations, I think there is a lot going on here. But the design does scream Web 2.0. The new logo is reminds me too much of Twitter. The sliders are an interesting addition, and I did find them useful. Roost seems to be fighting for credibility. For example it displays lots of other company logo’s (“Featured In”) and numbers showing you the amount of listings available. I guess this is understandable, but it is something remax.com doesn’t have to worry about.
Search results page
I just typed in a zip code of “92648” at a price range of 750K to 1.2M. This was much easier to do on Roost due to the sliders. Although, when entering in the price range on remax.com it automatically gave me the comma’s (“,”), so I didn’t have to count the zeros like I would on a lot of other real estate sites.
The search results came up quicker in Roost, but remax.com brought up more listings (443 vs 370). On my system, remax.com showed me 5 listings per page (you can change this).
remax.com's search results page
On the search results page remax.com does a simple sort by “lower to higher”, while Roost defaults at “Recently added”; both can be changed.
On remax.com I was only able to view 2 listings without having to scroll down for more, whereas Roost gave me 12. This, I believe, is a matter of personal preference, whether you want more listings viewable (meaning smaller photos) or larger photos and text.
Roost's search results page
Both pages had the listings maps. I didn’t like they way Roost implemented the map. Although it was larger than the map on remax.com I tend to use the scroll button on my mouse a lot which caused a problem. The map was “active” on the right hand side of the screen where I usually find the scroll bar. With my pointer on the map it zoomed in and out, not scrolling down the page as I expected.
Not filling the screen with listings gave remax.com more space to devote to lead capture forms and information about “Home Pricing Trends” and search fields. Again, I don’t know whether this trade off of less listing viewable per screen is worth it, hopefully thery are testing. If they are not seeing a lot of usage on these additional elements I would switch to more listings per page.
Detailed Listing Page
I selected 509 20th St, Huntington Beach, CA, listed at $1,099,000
This is can be broken up in to what’s above the fold and what’s below the fold.
First off, the remax.com page was taking a lot longer to load. Even when most of the images were displayed, I could still see my browser cranking away. Roost was nice and snappy.
remax.com -Is it a one story?roost -Or is it a two story?
The photo viewer on remax.com when you first came to the detailed listing page didn’t allow for images to be displayed, in portrait mode; Roost did. To be fair, you could see them in the correct mode once you clicked on the link “View All Photos” (also this might be a browser thing, I’m using FF on a Mac). But, first impressions where pretty dramatic.
I did like that remax had the listing photos start a slide show (once the page loaded!). Roost’s approach was to show me all the photos and let me jump to the image I wanted.
Remax.com chose to display the photos on the right hand side of the screen. Roost has them on the left. I went and checked some other sites, and they are all different. Realtor.com shows 4 big photos in a square starting from the left hand side. Trulia.com has them sort of in the middle. I guess everyone wants to be different.
I think that remax.com’s use of white space made the listing detail page much easier to read than Roost. As I’ve said, the approach to displaying photos is, to me, a matter of personal preference.
Below the fold:
Both sites have a lot going on here. Roost has a Google Street view imbedded and viewable on the map (nice). With remax.com, you must click to see the street view but they also have a “Balloon View” which gives you another interesting view of the property not offered by Google. Also, when you click on “Expand Map” you get an entirely new listing detail screen. I really liked this view and would argue that it would make a better default view of the detailed listing page.
Roost gives you a Zestimate, provided by Zillow, recent homes sales, and a mortgage calculator.
Remax.com gives you some quick links to neighborhood and school information (helpful), and recent home sales, but no Zestimate. Remax.com does give a list of “Similar Properties For Sale” which I think is a great feature.
Summary
I purposely didn’t go into any IDX issues or the way each site brands it’s brokers/franchisors and partners. I’m sure others can split hairs about how each site is properly displaying real estate listings.
I was impressed with how RE/MAX International’s new design stood up to Roost and other sites. Roost is an exciting and innovative Web 2.0 company and really leading in a lot of different areas. For a big corporation like RE/MAX International to create a compelling user experience is a huge accomplishment!
Of course, the main value proposition is how well these new site designs increase lead generation.
One thing is for sure: both teams have a great group of dedicated, creative, and talented people working hard to compete in a highly competitive arena!
UPDATE:
Joel at FOREM also reviewed Roost. His review is a good read that really focuses on the before and after of Roost’s changes.
