Brokers and top agents are invited to attend a new "opportunity" conference offered by Fidelity National Financial, Fidelity National Information Solutions, and Fidelity National Asset Management Solutions. The three-day meeting, called "Real Estate Professionals: Nobody Does It Better," will be held August 23-25 in Westminster, Colorado at the Westin Westminster Hotel, and it will focus on partnership opportunities and revenue generation.

Participants, or conference VIPs, will receive a copy of FNIS' real estate productivity software, and are eligible to win free accommodations to this year's event or for the 2003 conference, to be announced later.

The purpose of the conference is to "support our current business partners, and get new ones," says Dick Ward, executive vice president of FNIS's real estate division.

"Brokers who are members of MLSs or running our agent or transaction products are using our products, and maybe didn't know it was FNIS," says Ward. "We want to show them in an unbiased way who we are - it will be a candid discussion, we want interested people, but not everyone."

Ward makes no bones that the conference is open, yet closed. "It is a FNIS-sponsored conference," explains Ward. "This is the FNIS point of view, and we are disclosing to current and potential business partners our direction. We aren't selling anything. It is an opportunity for us to pre-debut products and services. It's like a spring trunk show where we are showing things we will have available later. It is connected to higher-level opinions from people across the industry. People are asking who is FNIS and what are you up to, and this is the initial attempt to answer this, and it gives us a way to explain and debut our products."

While the conference is broker-centric, Fidelity extends a welcome to top agents. "We aren't there to sell agent tools," says Ward, "but if the individual is a team leader or runs their agency business like a business, then this is oriented toward business opportunities."

Unlike other technology conferences which offer general educational opportunities to attendees, Ward says that the Fidelity conferences will be take it to the next level - first-mover advantage at the partnership level.

"We are going to be unveiling and showing business models - things we see the business of real estate will be conducted in the future," explains Ward. "Realtors who don't attend will miss that. Their competitors will take advantage to partner with us, and the Realtors who miss out won't get on the playing field until mid-next year. It is the early-adopter advantage. The VIPs will learn things they can take back and add value and make money with as soon as they get back home. They will get the first slot, and there is only a certain amount of capacity to install these things."

Conference highlights will include an opening-day golf tournament, interactive panel discussions with top franchise executives and industry trendspotters, keynote speeches by FNIS CEO Patrick Stone and Richard Mendenhall, former president of the NAR, a special session on the mold crisis, a VOW and IDX discussion, and an REO broker open house event, among other activities.

"We are going to be positioning where we want to go, and let them think about it, and if they want to be a part of that," says Ward.

The Fidelity real estate conference will be an annual event, and will add new focus as the real estate industry changes. Next year's event may focus on lead generation opportunities, for example.

"It will be a business opportunity conference going forward," says Ward. "there will be user groups sessions connected in the future as well as higher level discussions of where we see business opportunities, in a more formal structured environment. It may not always be in Denver, or this time of year. We're trying to queue one up for Chicago so that they can see the national data center."

"This will be the hottest must-attend conference next year," forecasts Ward. "No one has never done this before.

Published: August 6, 2002

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