Nov. 11, 2006 - Overlapping Market Disorder

I am here in New Orleans, at the annual NAR Convention. This city, and this convention, are landscapes of contrast.  Coming in from the airport, the cab driver took a back route to my hotel, and showed me the ugly, rotting buildings with the black water marks above the second stories.  And then, like magic, we enter the green, gold, and purple lights of the party area-- New Orleans dressed up and ready to jazz.

The contrast shows in the faces of the attendees, too—I’ve been to a couple of formal functions which are glitter and big hair and multi-media presentations.  And then yesterday, I watched the Realtors who’d been cleaning parks and pounding Habitat nails come back to the convention center, hot, sweaty and bug-bitten and rightfully proud of their day of labor.

I’ve been sitting through some meetings which are indicative of the Janus faces of this convention.  So many wasted moments, I am thinking.  My job as an association manager is to create products and services which will meet the needs of an industry which is reinventing itself.  My job is to see beyond the intense desire to close Pandora’s box of technology and consumer demands and the erosion of tradition. At the same time, I must be open to new ideas, threatening as they may be to the familiar pain of the status quo. That’s why I come to this convention: to renew, rebuild my vision.

This morning I endured some inflated and enthusiastic presentations on “trends of significance” to association managers. I learned about some reporting changes for RPAC, a proposed readjustment in the way officers are nominated at NAR, and the how realtor.com is going to change its mapping programs and cosmeticize its website. Then, this afternoon, we talked about how to enforce MLS rules relating to owner signs on Exclusive Agency listings.  Heady stuff, this….

Ok, I think.  When do we get to the good part?

It wasn’t until David Charron gave his presentation at the MLS administrators’ forum that the ‘good part’ began to take shape for me. David, CEO of one of the largest MLS operations in the US, issued a resonating challenge to MLS managers and staff, a challenge which cannot be ignored. “Human and political factors”, said Charron, “can hinder the transmission of (MLS) content as much as technical factors.

“As an industry, we have not delivered on the promise of regionalization to our brokers. At least not lately. If we had, why has so little changed in the last 10 years?

Just as associations 10 years ago feared loss of their cash cow, now we as MLS’ fail to consistently see beyond the local market.   And if we do, sometimes we don’t like the view. Maybe we are protecting our cash cows as well?

“Maybe those of us charged with creating the future have too great a stake in the status quo?”

Whoa, David!  Them’s fighting words!  I mean, we’re MLS professionals.  We know our jobs, and  we’ve tried reciprocal agreements, data sharing, and regionalization, and mergers, and….and…..

No, David says, it’s not working: “… even today, the local nature of the MLS continues to inhibit the potential of a contemporary MLS. The result is – 900 custom systems trying to deliver content management services to a customer base that has outgrown the local nature of the MLS. The custom and localized nature of these systems has made any attempt at standardizing the dataset seem a monumental task.”

Standardizing the database? Gasp.  You mean a NATIONAL MLS??? Or a (heaven forefend!) COMMON VENDOR??? 

Not for a minute do I mean that, says David. “What I do suggest is that we look for the commonality of the systems and promote the adoption and deployment of standards that support this commonality.

“Let's do this first and let the governance catch up with the process. Otherwise we will be mired in politics and conflicting policies while our customers, all of them, go out of business.”

We are dying of a disease, David explains.  It’s infectious and it’s spreading: it’s called ‘Overlapping Market Disorder’. Can it be cured? Yes….and some of the tools are already out there, RETS being one.  But this biggest and most powerful tool is not technology, it’s OUR attitude. “Now is the perfect time for all of us as MLS executives to work together with the same sense of cooperation that defines the very industry, indeed the very customers we serve.”

‘Overlapping Market Disorder?’ That’s a disease? Hey, man…that’s my source of cash.  Think of all those non-resident listings I’d loose.  And those secondary members that have to join my MLS to cover their market area. THAT’S my job—make money for my MLS business….. Besides which, there’s no commonality with the MLS that is next to ours: they have totally different business rules, and they don’t have fines for late listings, and........

The symbol that dominates New Orleans these days is the fleur-des-lys.  It’s everywhere—on flags, tourist items, glassware in restaurants.  This ancient heraldic and religious design has taken on a new meaning in a city which is rebuilding itself amid the ruins of its proud and flamboyant past. 

One particular legend about the fleur-des-lys tells a story in which the warrior Clovis, on his way to fight the king of Aquitania Alaric in the year 500, was searching in vain for a ford to cross a river, when a doe, frightened by the soldiers, jumped across the river along a ford that only it knew. The whole army then followed. On the banks, wild yellow irises grew in abundance: Clovis jumped off his horse, picked one and put it on his helmet as a symbol of his future victory. Thereafter did the kings of France use the fleur- des-lys as their emblem.

I’m not going to belabor the parallel…you are all smart enough to get it.  But perhaps those of us who are willing to better understand the business drivers, and the technical and political challenges that hinder the adoption and deployment of standards across markets might place a tiny fleur-des-lys on our websites or business cards as a symbol of our willingness to move forward.  Taking the first step toward crossing the barrier of Overlapping Market Disorder is not difficult.  As David Charron suggests: “I encourage you to take … steps in your own market.  To turn these steps into actions is as easy as picking up the phone and calling your peer who operates the MLS next to you.”

Nov. 4, 2006 - There! Now I feel better!

I was thinking last night that I hadn’t posted to this blog for a while: journal writing is not a discipline that I take to easily, and stopping to convert thoughts to writing makes me a little crazy.  Not a particularly healthy attitude for a writer, is it?  Probably why my poetry production is so low….

But I do write when I become really moved by my emotions—and anger is one of them.

Against injustice.  And closed-mindedness.

Right now I am angry.  The reason is the following letter, which recently appeared on an email list to which I subscribe:

“Thomas Wissel writes, "These issues seem to be all one at heart. At the mid-year meetings Ann Hale Bailey suggested that the MLS has become a public utility instead of the member based data exchange that was originally intended."

Ann Bailey spoke at the Council of MLS conference this year, essentially telling a roomful of people whose careers are managing MLSes that in a few years we'll all be irrelevant. I'm still trying to figure out how agents will share information without the database that is the essence of the MLS.

I get boggled down in the details, especially when I look at the working styles of my various members.

I'm also still trying to figure out why she's a popular speaker, especially at a gathering of MLS people. I can't think of anything constructive that she's had to offer. Except in Montreal - if I recall correctly, she's the speaker who passed out crayons and line drawings to color in. It really helped pass the time during her talk.”

Now there are a couple of things that really irritate me, here.  The first is, of course, the gratuitously snotty remarks about Ann. From Ann’s point of view, What good is it to be a futurist if you can only tell people the things they want to hear?  And from the association staff point of view,  why spend members’ money going to such conferences if one is not going to listen thoughtfully to challenge? 

The second irritant is the MLS manager’s (I assume that’s who the writer of this letter is) total misconception of what an MLS actually IS. Note the sentence “…how agents will share information without the database that is the essence of the MLS.”

The writer doesn’t get it.  The essence of the MLS is NOT the database, it’s the business rules. Google, et. al., are gonna take care of the database issue, my friend—better than most MLSs ever can think of doing.  To preserve the MLS in any format, we have got to think beyond database to whatever it is that the MLS offers to real estate professionals—and then we have to market those offerings to  members as much (or more) than we do to the public.  Because often members don’t understand the value of business rules or data integrity, and once they find a database program that is slick, user friendly, without nasty rules, and FREE---well, think about it.....

The final issue is the writer’s telltale use of ‘my’ as in ‘my members’. Nobody owns members. As a matter of fact, the internet is about not having boundaries—and one of the things Realtors most often dislike about the current MLS infrastructure is that they can’t easily access tools and information they need without additional cost and hoops through which to jump.  Often this barrier is because associations and MLSs are still vigorously staking claim on members, rather than proactively assisting them in solving their business problems.

Well, there.  I’ve said it. I named no names: I don’t even know the  writer of the letter that set me off.  I’m not even always in agreement with Ann Bailey, but we talk about our differences face to face, and I respect her ability to thoughtfully challenge the status quo.  Would that a few more of my peers exhibited some of those same characteristics.