Archive for the ‘General’ Category
Something off the topic of real estate, I have been trying the new 1.0 release of Songbird. If you have not heard of Songbird it is “an open-source customizable music player that’s under active development.” Besides being open source, it is also cross platform, meaning you can run it on Windows, Linux, or Mac. Running only Linux here for years now, this is very important to me.
Well, it looks like Mr. Jared Ritchey, of the (thus far) vaporware Open-Realty fork called ‘EZPro Realty’ is spreading rumors and creating confusion about Open-Realty once again. I just thought I would correct some of the explicitly inaccurate things Mr. Ritchey has been posting in his blog about Open-Realty most recently.
I was asked to come back and speak at the NAR annual conference again this fall. Thanks to everyone who showed up last year for our talk on Creating a RETS Powered Broker Website. This year I will be joining Andrew Tillman from CRT and John Holley from NTREIS to talk about the impact of the MLS policy requiring RETS. I hope to again this year meet some of our customers at the conference and talk with you face to face. If you are going to be at the conference please let us know. For information on our talk, please see the NAR Conference website.
On a daily basis we get emails from people that sound increasingly like this: “My developer left me high and dry” or “My SEO firm says my site can not use PHP” or maybe my personal favorite “I spent a huge amount of money with company X and they did not do what I wanted and I now need it done for nothing”. I am consistently amazed that people do not do more research into the companies and people they hire, but I am also equally dismayed by the individuals and firms who are trying to pass themselves off as developers and SEO experts who have little to none in regard to real expertise to offer. My shock and awe aside, I wanted to post some helpful tips here for Realtors when dealing with us technical folks in and effort to educate you to help make sure you are not going to get ripped-off. Some of these topics I will discuss will be very simple and obvious to many of you, but sadly, most are often not followed or considered.
There is some confusion among developers and Realtors® alike as to what the difference of RETS and IDX are. So I figured that I would write a short blog entry on this, to help clear up the confusion. First, lets start by looking at IDX and what that term means. IDX stands for Internet Data Exchange, and was a mandate from the National Associations of Realtors® that said the “Associations of REALTORS® and their Multiple Listing Services must enable MLS Participants to display on Participants’ public websites aggregated MLS active listing information subject to the requirements of state law and regulation.”
Big new folks. All MLSs are required to have a compliant RETS server by July 2009. Yes you heard it write the RETS standard is now a mandate for every MLS. This in my opinion is probably the best thing to happen for Realtors since the IDX policy was first mandated years ago. Kudos to the everyone at NAR and the executive boards that have made data standards a real priority. As a RETS client vendor I can not wait for the day when we can work every MLS in the country using one method to retrieve the data.
Next week marks the start of The 2007 Realtors Conference & Expo in Las Vegas. I hope to meet a lot of Realtors there who are using our software. I will be speaking, along with Jaison Freed from FBS Data Systems and Andrew Tillman from the Center for Realtor Technology. We will be presenting Friday from 11AM-12PM on the topic of “Creating a RETS Powered Broker Website”. We hope to make this a very informative time for Realtors and show how RETS can benefit your business. I will also be volunteering some of time to work in the RETS booth, on Tuesday from 6:30pm-8:00pm and Thursday 12:00pm-2:00pm. The RETS both is both number 2450 located in the NAR pavilion. I hope anyone attending will stop by, say hello and use the time to ask questions about RETS. If anyone would like to meet with me in Vegas please send me an email and I will make some time to meat with you individually.
Having just wrapped up the release of TransparentRETS 1.2, I can tell you we completed and passed compliance testing for RETS versions 1.5 and 1.7. On top of this we have tested TransparentRETS 1.2 with a RETS servers from every major real estate server vendor in the U.S. I figured now would be the perfect time to discuss RETS compliance. More specifically why we as an industry need to get off of our ass and take serious look at the lack of compliance in the industry. Third parties and Realtors need to deal with the constant problems caused by non compliant servers on a daily basis when trying to retrieve IDX data.
Well having run an open source project now for going on 4 years and having worked on other open source project as well I thought it would be a good idea to post about the ins and outs of running open-source projects and our business. I often get asked, how do you make money if your project is open source? Well good question, short answer is directly from the project revenue such as donations we don’t. Donations to open source projects are very few and far between. No one should ever take on an open source project unless you have a personal attachment to it and want to see it succeed. The ways we have found to make money and support the open source project have changed since I started the company and continue to evolve. However it has always been in some service that is tied closely to the project..
Anyone who keeps in regular touch with me, knows that for the last few weeks I was traveling due to the loss of a friend. This trip was as could be expected exhausting. Returning home was a very welcome relief, nothing like sitting in ones own chair drinking a cold beer after being on the road.. Now that I am back, I have been re-prioritizing some projects here. One of which was to get the blog online and start posting.
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