Jun. 28, 2010 - Real Estate Mobile Apps for the Consumer - 2010
Clareity Consulting just published a "Review of Real Estate Mobile Applications for the Consumer".
Clareity reviewed 23 leading real estate smart phone apps on features, ease of use, style, and reliability and took into account end-user reviews as well. Clareity found Realtor.com to be the leading real estate mobile application for consumers with nationwide coverage and found Redfin to be the leader regionally – both topping all three evaluation methods: number of features, Clareity's own ratings, and end-user ratings. But, this is a highly competitive space - Century 21 just released a new iPhone app today - and it wouldn’t take much for others to overtake the leaders.
As part of its consulting practice, helping software companies with their mobile strategies and helping real estate businesses evaluate software solutions, Clareity Consulting plans to continue to monitor the mobile app space and environment closely. Outside of the consumer space, applications geared toward professionals constitute a highly competitive area, and may well be the subject of a future Clareity study.
Apr. 28, 2010 - CalREDD and MRMLS Plan to Merge - YIPPEE!
Logic always prevails - eventually. Three years ago, Clareity Consulting predicted that the CalREDD MLS initiative being run by CAR was a flawed model and was only going to start a MLS civil war in the state. A few million dollars later (of members' money), it appears we were correct. Realtor dollars were fighting Realtor dollars, and a few big brokers finally said enough was enough. MRMLS is a well managed MLS that provides a good service and value to its members. It's great to see sanity prevail in California.
Congratulations to everyone that helped make this happen. Hopefully nobody will try to stop the merger for political reasons!
Apr. 22, 2010 - The NAR / RAMCO Association Management System - What's Known - April 2010
Everyone at AEI was left with many questions about the new The NAR / RAMCO Association Management System. Here are some questions we posed to the RAMCO team and answers received:
What is the RAMCO endeavor, in short?
The mission of the REALTOR Association Membership Cooperative shall be to work cooperatively with all REALTOR Associations and REALTOR Multiple Listing Services that choose to participate to create, provide support for and manage a comprehensive membership data solution that fulfills the changing needs of the REALTOR organization, allows flexibility for the diverse management requirements of its members, and reduces ongoing membership system and development costs.
Why was this endeavor engaged in?
RAMCO follows the request of AEs across the country who desire more responsiveness to their ongoing AMS needs as well as greater financial control of their management system expenditures.
What’s been decided at this point?
REALTOR Association Management System Cooperative (RAMCO) has selected Cobalt as the platform from which the new Internet based association management system will be developed. As part of the agreement, Cobalt will no longer independently provide its association management system to REALTOR associations, MLSs, or Institute, Society, and Council members.
How and why was Cobalt chosen?
Last Fall, the RAMCO Project team established a set of baseline requirements, existing AMS vendors were surveyed as to their interest in and ability to meet these baseline criteria. A team of REALTOR Association Tech Directors formulated a "Features and Functionality List" and every Tech Director nationwide registered in NRDS was surveyed to determine which of these features they currently had access to and which features they would use if they were made available. Of the associations meeting all the RAMCO Project Team requirements, Cobalt came out on top. A proposal was placed before the RAMCO Project team in Quebec City and after much discussion was approved.
When was this started?
The RAMCO Project Team, formed following the recommendations of previous work groups researching the association management system issue, has been in place for more than a year and is continuing to develop system features and functionality.
When will it be launched?
State and local REALTOR associations, REALTOR MLSs, and Institutes, Societies, and Councils may choose to participate in the cooperative when it is launched in early 2011.
What needs to be added to this AMS? Cobalt has already been selling to Associations for years – what’s going to take until 2011?
183 Features and Functions were identified and prioritized by our REALTOR Association Tech Directors. Additional features were added by the AEs attending three Focus Group sessions in Quebec City. The Cobalt system as it exists today is only the base from which the RAMCO system is being built. Except for three Pilot Associations, it is the intent of RAMCO to only release a fully functioning product.
What are the project risks and, if any, how are they being mitigated?
The success of RAMCO will largely depend upon the ability of our REALTOR Associations to own and operate a successful Cooperative. Based on our current leadership team and the management skills of our AEs and Technical Staff nationwide, this should not be a significant problem.
So, is this “NAR’s AMS” or “RAMCO’s AMS”?
RAMCO will be owned and operated by the members of the Cooperative. NAR will be a member of the Cooperative.
Who's paying for RAMCO, the Cobalt source code, the customization, etc.?
NAR has purchased exclusive source code rights for the real estate industry and has agreed to pay for the customization identified in the "Gap Analysis". Once the Cooperative takes control it will be responsible for its own budgets as determined by the RAMCO Board of Directors.
Who’s involved in RAMCO and in what roles?
Rob Authier, Jim Link and Travis Kessler are the three co-chairs of the RAMCO Project Team. Gar Anderson is the NAR staff coordinator working with Doug Hinderer, Mark Lesswing, Bob Goldberg, Laurie Janik, Katie Raynolds, Chris DeRosa, Mike Cutlip and Constance Freedman. The RAMCO Project Team consists of fifteen State, Local and MLS AEs and Tech Directors.
What kind of company is RAMCO? Is this a for-profit endeavor?
RAMCO's approved bylaws call for a not-for-profit Cooperative owned and operated by its user members. It's budget will be controlled by the RAMCO Board of Directors.
Will it have all the features my current AMS has? What new features should I get excited about?
According to the responses received from our nations Tech Directors, the RAMCO AMS will have 71 features that two-thirds of the 54 associations responding do not have available to them today but wish to employ. This fact alone will place the RAMCO AMS well ahead of anything currently on the market.
Who owns the source code?
NAR purchased the source code for all REALTOR Associations, MLSs and IS&Cs and will give RAMCO exclusive rights to the code once the Cooperative has been legally established.
Who’s going to host this? Where?
An RFP is being sent to interested hosting parties for approval by the RAMCO Project Team.
Will co-op accounting be available to all co-op members?
As with any of our Member Associations, what is disseminated will be at the decision of the RAMCO Board of Directors.
It’s a co-op right? Then how do I join? Can I get involved somehow now?
The RAMCO Project team will soon approve an on-line application to be used by future RAMCO owners.
What now?
Additional details will be provided following the RAMCO project team meeting on May 10th at the Midyear Legislative Meetings & Trade Expo in Washington.
When Clareity is performing executive recruiting or salary reviews for MLS executives, the most up-to-date information on MLS executive compensation packages is needed. Clareity requested that MLS executives from participate in a compensation survey.
Clareity Consulting just completed the 2010 MLS Executive & Staff Compensation Survey and is sending the report to survey participants. 115 MLS Executives participated in the survey, though Clareity received a number of additional responses especially from the largest MLSs but was asked to not include them in the report for privacy reasons.
MLS executives earn a wide range of salary, from less than $50,000 per year to solidly six-figure salaries. The survey showed a strong relationship between the number of MLS members and base salary range:
56% of MLSs smaller than 1,000 members pay an executive less than $50,000 per year – but some pay over $100,000 year.
MLSs larger than 3,000 members will generally not pay an executive less than $70,000 per year.
MLSs larger than 5,000 members will generally not pay an executive less than $100,000 per year.
MLSs larger than 10,000 members will generally not pay an executive less than $125,000 per year.
Many other factors affecting executive salary and benefits, including the geographic location of the MLS (cost of living), experience, number of staff and responsibilities.
Clareity also looked at what non-CEO compensation and bonuses for positions such as the COO, CFO / Controller, CIO / IT Director, MLS Director, Communications Director, Compliance Officer, Training Director, Trainer, Technical Support Manager and Staff, Network Administrator, Database Administrator, Web Applications Programmer, and Software Quality Assurance staff. Like CEO compensation, many factors affect the compensation and bonusing of these key staff.
Clareity thanks those MLS Executives who participated in updating our industry salary data, as it is an invaluable component when clients ask us to perform MLS Executive and staffing reviews and salary analysis.
Apr. 15, 2010 - Taking a Good Hard Look at the Realtor Association Mission
In the past Clareity Consulting has written about "Re-Missioning the MLS Organization" - now let's examine the mission of the Realtor Association.
Recently, our friend Judith Lindenau wrote about the need for associations to look beyond the MLS when considering technology implementation ("Life beyond MLS: Information Technology"), specifically, "Information Technology is an important part of the infrastructure of any organization or association these days and as association managers we need to evaluate it and increase its capacity to meet our needs and help us achieve our mission."
But what is that mission? Clareity visited the web sites of the top twenty Realtor Associations by membership size to find out.
Only six of the top ten associations had a mission statement on their web site, but of the next ten, nine had published the mission statement. So, fifteen of the top twenty published their mission statement. Since the mission tells the web site visitor - including the members and prospective members - about the organization and its goals, one would think that the mission would be on every web site and perhaps not as hard to find as it was on some of them.
Following is a breakdown of the Realtor Association mission into components. First listed is the number of times (out of fifteen) that each was evident in a mission statement, then that number represented as a percentage of the total, then the component itself:
9 (60%) - Member profitability / success
9 (60%) - Advocate for ownership / property rights
8 (53%) - Support professionalism / competency
8 (53%) - Support ethics / integrity
6 (40%) - Advocate for REALTORS(R) / interests / public policy
6 (40%) - Provide member services / resources / education
2 (13%) - Standard bearer for profession / voice for industry
1 (7%) - Build professional cooperation
1 (7%) - Advocate for Clients (the consumer)
Note that "public policy" could be considered a part of the "advocate" component, but where it was indicated, Clareity interpreted it to be something more broadly meant.
It is interesting that even the most popular mission components are only present in a maximum of 60% of mission statements. Are Realtor Associations really that different from each other? What seems to be core to so many mission statements are not even mentioned in others. Perhaps an interesting exercise at a future Association Executive conference would be for AEs to try to reach a consensus for the core components of a local Realtor Association mission statement.
When Clareity Consulting leads strategic planning sessions or is conducting in-depth evaluations of association activities and technology infrastructure, we examine the mission statement and its relationship to our clients' current and proposed strategies, the action plans that reflect them, and the technologies that support them. If your association activities and technology plan are only loosely aligned with your mission statement, either it's time to re-evaluate the activities, the mission statement or both!
Mar. 16, 2010 - Clareity Consulting "Beyond the Listings" Survey Results
With all of the buzz about the various organizations including RPR and Move.com approaching MLS operators offering to combine or integrate MLS data with other content, Clareity Consulting had a few questions to ask regarding this hot topic. We sent our survey to a few dozen top MLS executives to pass on to their subscribers.
Thank you to everyone that participated in our survey. We received over 9,000 responses! Click on the survey link below to see what questions came to mind and what subscribers felt most important to them.
http://www.callclareity.com/mls-beyond-the-listings-survey-2010.cfm
Hope this helps you in your content licensing decisions. Please give us a shout if you want any additional insights or advice.
Mar. 8, 2010 - 2010 MLS Workshop and Satisfaction Survey Recap
Clareity Consulting’s 9th Annual MLS Workshop was a huge success last week. We were proud to have more attendees and guest speakers than ever, along with presenting fresh research Clareity had performed regarding RPR, the content MLS users want most on their system, and the results of Clareity’s Annual MLS Customer Satisfaction Survey. The Tweets that went out were very positive and many attendees told us it was the best conference they had ever attended. Thank you to everyone that attended, the speakers, the sponsors, all of the Clareity staff, and especially my partner, Matt Cohen, who conducted timely and important research to help create such rich content for our Workshop.
We had 15 educational sessions and a ton of interaction and feedback from the audience. In addition to Gregg Larson, Matt Cohen and Amy Geddes from Clareity, we had speakers from Google, comScore, RPR, Onboard Informatics, eNeighborhoods, Admit One Security, Point2, Threewide, Privacy Solutions, W&R Studios, rEstimate, RPR, and First American CoreLogic. We also showed a glimpse of Move.com’s new “Find” product and discussed the future of RETS and data standards for the industry.
As you can imagine, the revenue share offering to MLSs from CoreLogic was of interest to many as the final details of the program were revealed. The audience had lively discussions about RPR, and we compiled a list of questions to ask Dale Ross and Marty Frame. Marty Frame provided an update on RPR and I interviewed Dale and Marty and asked a series of tough questions. It was obvious Dale and Marty had heard most of the questions during their recent coast-to-coast presentations, and their answers are becoming more polished as the details are filled in. After the interview, the questions from the audience were direct and pretty civil. RPR still has a big sales effort ahead of it, but it was good to see the many unknowns starting to fill in.
Participation in Clareity’s Annual MLS Customer Satisfaction Surveywas great – 271 responses representing over one million MLS users. Of the vendors with larger customer bases, FBS and Tarasoft led the pack in overall end-user satisfaction, but MarketLinx MLXchange and TEMPO both rated 100% "Excellent" or "Good". For LPS Paragon that figure is 95%. For vendors with smaller customer-bases, Stratus and dynaConnections did well, as always. It was nice to see that most of the vendors did a great job in 2009.
Last November, Clareity Consulting conducted a survey of MLS and Association executives to measure the initial response to RPR and HouseLogix after NAR presented the two new initiatives via webinar. As we reported at that time, 32% of MLS leaders felt their MLS would participate in RPR, and 27% felt they would eventually. Others said no, or were undecided, and everyone wanted more details and had questions to be answered.
Clareity just conducted our 9th Annual MLS Vendor Customer Satisfaction Survey. Out of curiosity, we added a question on RPR participation to see how MLS organizations were feeling about it now that much more detail about RPR has been made available, and we found some interesting results. 242 MLS Executives, representing nearly one million MLS subscribers, responded to the RPR question (How likely is it for your MLS to integrate with RPR in its first year?) in our February 2010 survey. Here is the question we posed and the response summary:
As you can see, 2% said yes, and 15% thought it was likely they would integrate with RPR during its first year. About 8% said no, and 17% said it was unlikely. Or, if we combine the positives and negatives, 17% indicated they were likely to join RPR in its first year, and 25% are leaning away from joining at this point. The majority of 57% are still undecided, and 11% chose not to answer this question.
When we looked deeper into the data and did a "cross tab" analysis, we found two interesting facts:
1) Size didn't matter. I think some people assumed that larger MLS organizations might be slower to join RPR, while smaller organization would be more likely to join sooner. This was not the case in our findings - there really was no correlation.
2) Hosting the MLS did matter. This was a bit of a surprise. As a group, MLS organizations that host their own MLS system hardware at their office or at a collocation facility were much less likely to participate in RPR. This could be attributed to the independent nature of these MLSs because they are more of the "do it yourself" types and wish to remain independent, or perhaps they feel they have the staff and ability to offer functionality similar to RPR themselves.
It's clear that more MLSs are starting to form an opinion and make a decision on RPR, at least on their initial position. In addition, Move.com and First American CoreLogic have recently responded with competitive or alternative offerings to RPR, so stay tuned for future reports.
Feb. 11, 2010 - Does Mercado make California's Statewide MLS Effort Pointless?
eNeighborhoods announced they have linked major MLSs in northern and southern California via its new Mercado platform. This link is a significant step towards the creation of a virtual statewide system in California that leverages existing MLS operations and expertise, without users having to convert systems. This type of technology solution also eliminates the politics, pain, and expense of creating a statewide MLS, as CAR has attempted to do via its calREDD initiative.
Mercado provides the primary benefit offered by any statewide MLS: access to listing data statewide via a common user interface. In addition to listing data, Mercado is providing integrated local content such as neighborhood, community and school information. eNeighborhoods announcement today states:
“Mercado is a Web-based marketing system that leverages the cross-MLS property search of MLSAlliance, joining together multiple California MLS databases, with local information on neighborhoods, school districts, and community demographics. Mercado provides real estate professionals with a single gateway to a vast amount of real estate information throughout the state for producing personalized CMAs, buyer tours, and single-property profiles, along with market-to-market comparisons and referral opportunities.”
eNeighborhoods has years of experience handling massive, national databases, so Mercado utilizes proven, scalable technology to provide agents and brokers the information they want to better serve consumers. If scalable and practical alternatives like Mercado are available today, isn’t it time to end the disruptive and expensive “civil war” going on between local associations, regional MLSs and the state association in California? The REALTOR® volunteer and staff time spent fighting over the MLS is incalculable, and the millions of dollars invested in a system that is only supporting about 2000 out of nearly 200,000 members is insane. Surely there are better ways to spend the members’ money. It’s time to stop wasting “Realtor dollars fighting Realtor dollars” as David Charron, CEO of MRIS, aptly described the situation in California. I predicted that calREDD would be an expensive and bloody quagmire in a paper addressed to CAR leadership several years ago that was not well received. In hindsight, I regret to say I was right, but it’s not too late.
CAR Leadership and calREDD should take this opportunity to rightfully claim victory for spurring the creation of both CARETS and Mercado, the largest data sharing initiatives in the nation. It’s time for calREDD to gracefully fold itself into these successful initiatives and for CAR to refocus its political power and members’ money on getting every MLS in the state to cooperate. This would put an end to the civil war, encourage natural MLS consolidation, and save everyone money, brain damage, and the political scars that will last a lifetime.
RSS Blog Feed