Tzetze Fly

Continuing the theme of love, standards, and sharing in the New Year, it’s good to see the news from Zillow, Yahoo!, Trulia, and other real estate listing sites that they will work together with RESO to ensure data standardization using RETS. That’s a big win for the brokers and the real estate industry as a whole, as it will add great efficiency to their processes. The RETS Data Schema workgroup deserves a lot of credit for creating a thorough and flexible XML schema over the last couple of years. I know that was a lot of work, but it’s showing great results now.

Coverage in the press and blogoshpere has been very positive:

• Inman News
• TechCrunch
• BloodhoundBlog

Lot’s of love going around this first full week of 2008. Nice to see everybody coming together - New Year’s resolutions perhaps?

• Facebook, Google, and Plaxo join the DataPortability Workgroup. Goal is to release your data from the clutches of your social network in a standard way.
• The OpenID train steams ahead: Google, IBM, and Verisign said to be joining. Goal is to allow you to login to all your favorite sites in a standard way with one id.
• Connecting Standards at Inman in NYC. Goal is to leverage the work done by RESO on the standard RETS2 schema to allow more efficient syndication and updating of real estate listing data.

Standards allow developers to concentrate on creating value with their products instead of worrying about creating proprietary methods for authentication, import/export, etc. This leads to more efficient tools for consumers and businesses.

Did I miss any related standards announcements? Leave them in the comments.

To start the new year off right, Mike Wurzer composed a great open letter to all the public sites that expose listing data on behalf of brokers - including Yahoo!, Google, Trulia, and Zillow. It encourages the use of common data standards to make it easier, cheaper, and more efficient for brokers to upload listing data and keep it updated.

Right now, brokers have to spend time and money inputting their listing data into the numerous (and growing) consumer sites. If they develop technology to automate getting their data from the MLS or back office systems into one of these public sites, they still have to write code to interact with the API’s and data formats of each site individually. If you want your listings on a dozen sites, you must write code, test, debug, and keep updated with all dozen, and in a dozen different formats. I know that for RE/Max International (we run remax.com and handle around 75% of their US office traffic), the limiting factors for widespread syndication of their listing data has been cost and effort. Right now, we are syndicating listings for many offices to GoogleBase on their behalf, but that project has not been extended to other sites. Instead, it is left up to individual brokers or regions to handle their own listing syndication.

Over the past couple of years, the Schema Workgroup of RETS has done a fantastic job creating new XML schemas for real estate data sharing. The schemas describing listing data are particularly well developed, having been hammered on by MLS staff, MLS system vendors, client vendors, and other technical staff for over a year. Others in the real estate technology space would be well served to utilize this intellectual property - and help the RETS group improve on it - to accomplish the common goal of providing better tools and lower costs to the brokerage community. These standard schemas should easily fit into their current processes, utilizing simple XSLT transformations to convert the standard XML schema into their current proprietary schemas. This small addition to the workflow of a few sites would amount to a tremendous savings on the input side of thousands of participants - the brokers and the MLS’s - and encourage increased participation.

Only when we have consistent standards do we see an increase in the creation of tools, increases in efficiency, and lowering of costs. The participation of these leading web sites in the mission of the Real Estate Standards Organization will go a long way toward ensuring adoption of these standards.

• Preliminary NAR Gateway Report released - BloodhoundBlog
  
  Finally - some details about this project. Good to see specific use of RETS here. Would love to see lot’s of comments on this, but the timing of this release will probably limit the discussion.

• NAR’s Gateway Concept Out In The Open - FBS Blog
  At long last, the NAR’s Gateway concept is out in the open for discussion. I’ve been asking about more details for some time and want to thank Jim Duncan for making it happen.

  Trust Michael to instigate much of the discussion.

This is really well done - and funny!

From Mark:

This Earth Day I made a presentation at a technical conference in Austin, TX that combined Programming, Real Estate and a Rube Goldberg device I called Mark’s Portable Pedal Power Generator. The device turned kinetic energy in the form of a spinning bicycle wheel into standard AC electricity. Google and Specialized Bikes announced a video contest for just such a device a few months later. The contest ends this week and is hosted by YouTube. I have created an 84 second Video that shows me lighting a Christmas Tree in the middle of a forest, using the device.

Click here to watch the video. And give Mark some link love when you’re done.

Had a bunch of meetings in the morning, including our friend David Crombie all the way from Australia. They are doing some pretty aggressive things in both Australia and New Zealand with flowing listing data to the web and print media. He brought all of us some bottles of Aussie wine which was greatly appreciated.

Worked the RETS booth on the show floor in the afternoon and got to talk to a few agents who stopped by to ask questions about the state of the standard. After that I made a loop of the show floor. Didn’t really see anything new that stood out this year, but was surprised by the number of booths promoting both domestic and international second home and resort properties. I’m thinking that may be a waste of time given the malaise most Americans feel about real estate right now and the weakness of the dollar overseas.

After a great cocktail party at the eNeighborhoods suite, dinner was with an eNeighborhoods crew at Isla’s Mexican Kitchen and Tequila Bar over in the Treasure Island - recommended. Ran into Bob Morse - now with FNRES - at the bar and he joined us at the table for dinner. We were referred by the concierge at the Paris, but Bob said he read a People magazine on the plane and it mentioned this is where a bunch of celebrities eat when they’re in town. The guacamole was great.

Big thanks to the Marketlinx crew for putting on a great party at Margaritaville. The drinks and food were flowing, and it was full of of industry people talking and having a good old time.

The CRT lunch was great. Chris McKeaver at CRT treated us right with good food and good people, which lead to great conversations. Thanks to the entire CRT crew for putting this event on. Hopefully it will become a tradition.

Mark Lesswing - CTO of NAR - filled us in on a new MLS rule that passed unanimously at the conference requiring all MLS’s to provide an up to date, compliant RETS server. Mark lobbied for this to ensure not just the spread of RETS servers, but to accelerate their usage. This is a great rule that should have a positive affect on real estate standards.

Mark also introduced Lennox Scott as the new technology liasion for the NAR President. I spoke with Lennox for about ten minutes about his plans, which center around utilizing technology to accomplish “real time real estate”.

After a series of good meetings, we went to dinner at Del Frisco’s with our old friends and great customers from Sacramento Metrolist. The rib eye at this place was probably the best I ever had!

Had sushi last night at Tao with John Hensley from FNRES and Mike Wurzer from FBS. These guys are such high quality, smart people and just a pleasure to be around. I always learn more in these dinner discussions than I do in three days around the show floor. If you go, make sure to try the white tuna - it was insanely good!

We had a great discussion about web services and Sam Ruby’s great new book “RESTful Web Services”. (I’m hoping to provide a book report here on this soon.) Seems like every time I read a book or article and can’t wait to refer Wurzer to it, he’s already on it. Of course, lot’s of discussion on RETS too. Later Hensley provided current insight into one of my other favorite topics - Orange County real estate.

We had a couple of groups come by to say hi, and it struck me that the projects the three of us are working on are probably affecting the daily work of 90% of the Realtors out there. That’s pretty heavy.

I’m off to the CRT sponsored lunch right now, which should be interesting. I understand 140 people are expected.

So here’s what we’ve been working on -

We’ve been running remax.com on our Enterprise Platform at eNeighborhoods for the past year and a half. Starting Spring 2008, we’ll also be running listing searches, lead distribution, and office web sites for century21.com, coldwellbanker.com, and era.com as part of a huge new deal with Realogy. Lot’s of traffic, eh? I’m calculating that the cumulative real estate listings traffic passing through our platform next summer will come very close to the long dominant realtor.com. This deal has been over a year in the making, and I know both Realogy, eNeighborhoods, and Dominion Enterprises are all very proud that it is finally seeing the light of day.

Press releases:

From eNeighborhoods - http://www.eneighborhoods.com/press_11_12_07.asp
From Realogy - http://www.realogy.com/media/pr/show_release.cfm?id=466

Photo courtesy Zap2It.

Just returned from a family wedding outside of Dallas (yeeeeehaw!), so I’m not leaving for Vegas until tomorrow morning. I’ll be there Tuesday around lunch time. If you want to hook up, drop me an e-mail - I’ll get it on my Treo.

I’ve used librets with Ruby on WinXP for a while now, but now I need it on my new Mac to try out some new ideas with RETS. Clearly, I’m a Mac “noob”, but boy - was this freakin’ hard! I’ve documented it here for future reference. Hopefully it will help someone else out.

Download librets

• Download librets-1.1.9.tar.gz from CRT.
• According to /doc/build/mac-osx.txt and unix.txt, it looks like there’s a lot of dependencies to install and build, which I’m not too comfortable doing manually.
• There’s a note that that the OpenDarwin package manager can install these for you, and I remembered reading about MacPorts earlier, so that seems worth installing.

Install MacPorts

• Download and install MacPorts from http://www.macports.org/
• Make sure path is correct according to installation instructions.
• Update MacPorts using “sudo port selfupdate”.

Install dependencies

• Install Boost using “sudo port install boost”. Takes a while - about 15 minutes for me.
• Install Expat using “sudo port install expat”
• Install ANTLR using “sudo port install antlr”
• Install libcurl using “sudo port install curl”
• Install swig using “sudo port install swig”. This was not documented as a dependency, so it took a while to figure this one out after the below steps kept failing.

Build librets

• “./configure” kept returning errors finding Expat and Boost files.
• Used “./configure –with-expat-prefix=/opt/local –with-boost-prefix=/opt/local” instead.
• “make”
• “sudo make install”

Build librets ruby

• In the project/swig folder, use “make ruby”

Test

• In the project/swig/ruby folder, run “ruby login.rb” and “ruby search.rb”

You’ll know now if you’ve got everything dialed in. Note that when you are writing your own Ruby code in a different folder, make sure you include the path to librets.rb at the top like this:

# Prepend load path with path to librets.rb
$:.unshift(’/usr/local/src/librets-1.1.9/project/swig/ruby’)
require ‘librets’
include Librets

Geez! That took a while. I guess if I’d had a lot of *nix experience, it would have been easier, but librets has a special Windows install that easier.

Special thanks to the CRT guys for making librets freely available.