Where Real Estate Gets Its Dirt

Upstream CEO, Alex Lange announces Upstream website “in a few weeks”.

Two things I learned today. Alex Lange, newly appointed CEO of Upstream, has a blog. Secondly he says Upstream will launch a new website in a few weeks. Which means August?

Thirty Days Swimming Upstream

I also want transparency, so you have all the information you need to plan effectively. With that said, I will launch the Upstream website in a few weeks. It will have designs, documentation and talking points so you can inform your teams. I will frequently post our status and write about what’s working, what’s not and how we’re addressing issues (the good, the bad and the ugly). I will dissect our operating agreement for you as well as our corporate charter. You will have access to everything that is Upstream.

Upstream reveals new logo

Upstream Logo

Man, this logo is no joke!

Alon Chaver joins HomeServices of America

alon
Alon Chaver Joins HomeServices of America as Chief Information Officer

“Chaver is well-known within the real estate industry and brings nearly 20 years of product innovation and leadership experience. Most recently, Chaver served as Trulia’s vice president, industry services where he was responsible for data acquisition, data quality and the development of products and services to support Trulia’s partnerships with the real estate industry. Chaver currently serves as a director on the Broker Public Portal’s board of managers. Chaver earned a law degree from University of California-Berkeley School of Law and served as Lieutenant, Communications and Electronics in the Israeli Defense Forces from 1982-1986.”

Alon is legit. I believe he will be a reasonable voice to the current discussions around how/when/if Upstream is implemented.

MRIS and TREND to combine data feed

MRIS and TREND Announce Combined Real Estate Content Feed

“Last fall, MRIS and TREND announced their intention to consolidate their MLSs to create the next era of MLS that will preserve compensation and cooperation, promote the expansion of an orderly and efficient marketplace and provide brokerage firms greater control of and access to their listing content. MRIS and TREND are starting now to find concrete ways to serve the combined brokerage community. The first product to be delivered will be a new feed with listing content from both MLSs.”

Another blow to the narrative that MLS providers aren’t serving or listening to the needs of their (big) brokers members.

“When brokerages operate across multiple marketplaces, they must aggregate information from multiple data feeds, apply the appropriate display rules for each MLS, and pay redundant technology costs, all in order to have a unified IDX search on their own websites or improve brokerage operations,” said Sandra Troccoli, Director of Information Technology & Website Services for Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices (BHHS) Homesale Realty. “This is a new opportunity that will reduce technology costs and cumbersome management of duplicate feeds. It highlights the importance of MLS consolidation from a technology standpoint.”

Moves like this and CRMLS and MLSListings’ previous announcement are showing that MLS providers can come up with ways to address the concerns of big brokers. But big brokers must make MLS providers part of the solution.

2015 “Brass Balls” list

Lists, lists, and more lists. I’ve read a lot of lists in the past couple weeks. So, in honor of our site mascot, a picture of Alec Baldwin playing “Blake” in the film Glengarry Glen Ross holding two brass balls, I thought I’d kick off 2016 with a list of my own. These go individuals who made the news last year that have displayed that they have a pair, for better or worse.

Art Carter – California Statewide MLS
The day CRMLS launched the itsmybusiness.me site it showed that Art wasn’t afraid to stir things up.

David Charron and Tom Phillips – MLS Evolved
The narrative has always been that the egos of MLS executives would mean consolidation at any meaningful level would be impossible. David and Tom proved them all wrong by changing the game.

Chris Crocker – The Zillow “Whistleblower” letter
You can argue about his motives but the guy knew the possibility his identity would be revealed.

Dale Stinton and Dale Ross – Upstream and AMP
The relationship between NAR and MLS providers has never been great (or even good.) The launch of RPR (Realtor Property Resource) only served to increase the acrimony. But when NAR announced that RPR would be funding Upstream and AMP (both initiatives aimed directly to disrupt MLS providers) it took the more than brass, but maybe titanium balls to say “our members told us to do it”.

Kevin Tomlinson and “The Jills”
South Florida. Those two words can cause a involuntary eye roll in most. I don’t know which took more balls, “The Jills” who appear to have knowingly manipulated MLS data to protect their “1 percent” clients, or Kevin Tomlinson who looks to be caught on recording “blackmailing” both of them, (and subsequently being forcible arrested by the cops) and later declaring its all a “misunderstanding”.

CRMLS and MLSListings walk the walk.

It’s been a crazy few weeks, so I haven’t been posting too much lately. Top of my list was to talk about the announcement that CRMLS and MLSListings will begin sharing listings. This “barrier-free” agreement means both MLS providers will show listings via each others Matrix MLS system.

This shows real progress in Art Carter’s “ItsMyBusiness” campaign.

And also is counter to the narrative that larger brokers are putting out (a la Upstream) that MLS executives are standing still and deaf to their concerns. MRIS and TREND MLS’ MLS Evolved initiative is another good example of MLS executives putting their own interest behind in favor of exploring alternative solutions.

Kudos to Art and Jim.

A land war in Asia

Screen Shot 2015-12-01 at 10.13.55 PMKudos to Andrea Brambila at Inman News on a great article, MLSs anxious about their role in Upstream, about the MLS communities concerns regarding Upstream. It’s a great article and you should go read it now.

I think David summed it up best.

“MLSs are the default information exchange that facilitates tens of millions of dollars of residential real estate every minute. So it stands to reason we have questions,” David Charron, CEO of Metropolitan Regional Information Systems Inc. (MRIS), told Inman in an email. [W]e surely support the aspirational intentions of Upstream. But we will not sit quietly when the proposed solution places so much of the broker and agent business at risk.”

But, to me, it’s a bit more complicated. Who do MLSs want answers from? RPR? Upstream (the organization)? To me RPR is simply the vendor in this equation. Upstream is the client. And it turns out that Upstream (the client) doesn’t even know what they want. Here’s Cary Sylvester, from KW, one of Upstream’s Board members.

“Upstream is new and different and we don’t have all the answers yet; and this keeps us agile to create the best solution to meet those goals. What we do have is a structured discovery process we’ll work through with each MLS.”

W—T—F?

We don’t have a plan, but that’s great, because it means we are wide open to having a plan?

If Upstream is going to happen it is going to be about making the right choices. Any vendor, including RPR, might have the right partners, tech, and experience to pull this off, but they are going to have to help their clients understand what’s possible and what’s not.

I’m hoping that the people behind Upstream begin to realize that MLS providers provide a service that makes their most valuable asset, listings, even more valuable. And that they can start to think more inclusively about MLS providers being part of the over all solution, instead of just an arrow pointing out to a box on a diagram.

RPR inks deal with Upstream

RIS Media got the scoop yesterday…

NAR’s Realtors Property Resource Executes Definitive Agreement with UPSTREAM, Begins Development

“The National Association of Realtors® and its wholly owned subsidiary, Realtors Property Resource®, have signed a technology agreement with UPSTREAM™, a revolutionary industry-owned and controlled data management company, to develop UPSTREAM™’s cross-industry, state-of-the-art platform for real estate data entry, collection and distribution for real estate brokers.

A win’s a win.

WAV Group publishes secret decoder ring for Project Upstream

82DnkVaGjrLVictor Lund of the WAV Group has published a document entitled “Upstream Revealed“. Basically he has taken Craig Cheatham’s recent statements and clarified them. In the example below Victor’s comments are in parens.

Upstream also is designed to serve as a platform for controlling access to and distribution of the data, along with the establishment of the terms for any use. Participating brokers would designate within Upstream which specific data would be accessed and manage the conditions for use. (Brokers control their data on a dashboard like they do for listings syndication today. The difference is that other data sets like agent records, firm records, consumer records, and vendor rosters are all in the same place.)

Re-reading Craig’s statements with Victor’s comments made the whole thing easier to read. Victor decodes the pretencious “corporate speak” of the original language. I like it a lot. One quibble, I would have preferred they numbered each section.

Having said that, I have a question about how data will be handled with vendors (this is Vendor Alley after all). Here’s what the statement says (with Victor’s clarifications)

”
Application providers, from those assisting with external display/use to those powering systems used inside of brokerages, are set to benefit from the single set of “clean” data directly from Upstream with the broker’s permission. Brokers are hopeful this will allow real estate companies and their representatives to deploy data sets to vendors directly and efficiently, eliminating the need for MLSs to deal with data integration issues and giving vendors one format nationwide instead of hundreds of databases and data layouts. (Micro case study – a broker with 360 listings wants to switch virtual tour vendors. It requires data license agreements with five MLSs and data mapping that takes weeks to implement. The listings that come back are watermarked and low resolution. The only way to improve this is to manually duplicate the data).

I admit that I might not totally understand everything here. And I have to say I really love this concept in theory. But how would Upstream handle different listing statuses? Say a vendor has a product that sends out “Just Sold” postcards, or “Under Contract” flyers. Or a CMA that needs Expired listings? Are those in Upstream on just the MLS? Do they sync? How often?

You can download the PDF here: Upstream Revealed

Craig Cheatham interview from CMLS 2015 now posted

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