You may remember a past issue of Agent News where I voiced my concern over the relationships among NAR, Realtor.com and Homestore.com in terms of how our data was being aggregated and used to create profit for a company (Homestore.com) that was largely owned by Cendant, a huge competitor of ours. I appreciate the feedback I have received from many of you who shared my concerns.

Since then, a couple of things have happened that have greatly altered the course of the situation. First, of course, Homestore.com has been steadily imploding and its future is in serious question. I have called for the NAR to change vendors for Realtor.com. This is the only prudent thing to do in light of the conflicts of interests with Cendant and Homestore’s uncertain future. Second, a major industry supplier, Fidelity National Information Solutions (FNIS), has been working diligently on an exciting new suite of products that will, for the very first time, enable real estate franchisees and brokerages to aggregate and manage their own data—rather than depending on MLS systems to do it for them. If you recall, one of the solutions I suggested was affordable, aggregating software for each broker, and it appears that FNIS has developed it.

This is extremely exciting to me as it directly addresses my concerns over how we have lost control over our own information and have been allowing our own trade association to sell it to a third party companies. With these new products, we can regain control over our most precious commodity as real estate professionals, our listings and our customers.

Several weeks ago, FNIS officially rolled out Agent Office, a secure, intranet application that enables brokers and their agents to effectively manage the entire real estate life cycle. This suite of agent productivity tools features a number of individual applications that our brokers and agents can adopt to better manage their listings, as well as their transactions.

Critical to the listing management and aggregation issue is their program called ListingView, which allows brokers to gather information from their agents, manage it internally, present it first on their own website, then publish it to the MLS and, when they choose to, provide it to other international sites. This works in reverse of how this information is currently managed. It will now allow us tighter control over our own data, control that we have heretofore allowed the MLSs to manage.

Here is my goal: We need to start a movement to get ALL brokers to use their own aggregating software and demand that our data not be sent to Homestore.com. Understand that I personally still want the data on Realtor.com, but not on Homestore.com. Without our data, Homestore’s value diminishes rapidly, and we no longer are benefiting our competitors. I believe that Agent Office and ListingView can ultimately herald the demise of Homestore.com. The breakthrough Internet Data Exchange (IDX)-compliant capabilities are directly designed to return control to brokers and agents, which from a recruiting and retention standpoint, should be very compelling.

Among the other offerings under the Agent Office umbrella are tools such as SureLead, MyContacts, Property Toolkit, SleeplessAgent, MobileAccess, ClosingStatus and ValueYourHome. Any and all should provide state-of-the-art productivity tools for those who choose to subscribe to them. Another program introduced at the same time, yet separate from Agent Office, is TransactionPoint, which will allow all parties involved in the transaction to follow it through the entire process. Both programs can be fully integrated with each other.

Although I am principally excited about ListingView, since it addresses the listing aggregation and management dilemma, I think you’ll find the rest of the products to be extremely helpful in enhancing your productivity and profitability. The good news is, we each have the capability to select only those products that we feel are most important to us, rather than having to subscribe to them all.

Even better news is the fact that FNIS has had the foresight to plan for integration or bridging of these new tools with existing programs such as Top Producer, Executive Office or Executive Agent. That way, if you choose to continue to use one of these products, FNIS will have integration paths to these new products available as early as this March.

Each product will carry its own monthly subscription price, but I believe that the pricing will be quite competitive and palatable. In addition, FNIS has even expressed interest in earmarking a portion of our subscription fees to support our Homes from the Heart program!

It is no secret that I am delighted about the fact that this could be is a Homestore.com killer, because everything FNIS is creating is designed to protect the broker and our data. Look for pricing and additional details soon or visit FNIS’ website at www.fnis.com.

Richard A. Rector, is the chairman of Realty Executives, one of the top ten real estate franchise organizations in the nation, and one of the first "100 Percent" commission organizations.

Published: March 21, 2002

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