Hello there.

I can’t believe it, but it’s time to start planning for the Solid Earth User Summit of 2012. We’re already hard at work making sure that this year’s event is well worth the time and expense. You should have received an email today with some details about the event, but I wanted to take a minute and add something important we mentioned as we were leaving Atlanta last year.

You may recall Brian Sparks, a broker and 2011 MLS Committee Chair from Birmingham, was in attendance last year in Atlanta. I had personally invited Brian (with Juli’s permission) and I thought his broker-level viewpoints were absolutely invaluable. Therefore, I’d like to ask that you consider inviting a member of your leadership team to attend this year’s Summit. There are no rules here, just someone you feel would add to the discussion and that you don’t mind spending time with. Maybe a tall order!

This isn’t a requirement by any means. If you think of someone obvious, ask them to join us. If not, leave it alone and maybe there will be someone next year. All I’d request is that if you do decide to invite someone, it be limited to one person and you let me know ASAP who that person is. We have a large group already and need to keep up with the head count.

If you have questions, just let me know.

That’s all for now. Hope all is well and see you soon!

As I drove from Pensacola to Ft  Walton today, I noticed lots of new building, huge beachfront and near-beach construction and what felt like some renewed activity in a market that’s been pretty flat (see inset for 5-year chart).   The best news about this chart is found when you compare it to Orlando, or Birmingham, or Louisville.  Many places have faired very badly indeed when compared to ECAR.

Today Susan and Cliff and I talked about a wide range of things including the future of Spring MLS, the revolutionary new MLS platform from Solid Earth and how we’ll be releasing it to ECAR.  We talked about advertising on the public site, EmeraldCoastHomesOnline.com and how that might work, if the MLS Committee wants to pursue the concept.  We cited the example of www.mlsarealistings.com in Tennessee as a “comp”.  There is significant revenue being generated from the site and ECAR has more traffic.  There are issues with advertising though, and Cliff and Susan are still thinking about it, understandably.  The public site in the area, www.emeraldcoasthomesonline.com has huge traffic but it’s the only site that does not carry ads.  The public loves this I’m sure and we may loose traffic if we cover up the site with ads.  Still I think tasteful placement of ads could be tolerated and would produce significant revenue.

At the end of our meeting today, as a serious thunderstorm passed the restaurant, we shared our hopes for the market, we also shared a desire to increase cooperation on the panhandle and to advance the interest of the real estate trade associations who have done so much for their subscribers.  Thanks Cliff!  Thanks Susan! And thanks all of those who made this long relationship possible.

Thanks very much to Wendy Cusick Alley and Chuck Michaels for the time today.  It’s so wonderful spending quality time with customers who really “Get It”.  Pensacola was the first customer (outside of our hometown) to give us a shot and we’ll never forget that.  Their consultant Steve Yanoviak from Management Advisorsdisagreed with their choice, but they did it anyway!  After Pensacola we worked with Steve about a dozen times and he became a good friend.  But he was not wrong to insist that Pensacola choose a more experienced vendor, after all, we had only built one!

But that was 10 years ago.  Wendy and Chuck we’re not even there.  Neither was our friend Juli Pleitner who has come and gone to Birmingham since then.  But www.solidearth.com is still here, trying to be Bill Gates, Henry Kissenger and I don’t know, Mr Wizard or something at the same time.  I think we’ve failed at some of those roles but we’ve succeeded at a few of them, and those small successes are important to celebrate.  The real estate business in the panhandle over the last  ten years has been a rough and tumble place but I am very proud of our team, and the AEs and MLS coordinators who have made it all possible and helped us hold it all together.

The meeting today was centered around the roll-out plan for Spring, advertising on the MLSs sites and our new strategic partnerships.  We are very excited about 2012 and we’re looking forward to it, together.

The Louisiana Superdome

Suddenly it was back to work. It seemed like the game had barely ended before Matt and I (along with COO Leslie and CTO Robb) were on a plane to New York to attend the 2012 Inman Connect conference. If you’re unfamiliar, Connect is where every real estate technology mover and shaker – primarily those stationed East of the Mississippi – comes to talk and listen. Connect NYC has become one of those “must-attend” meetings for us based on the sheer brain-power-per-square-foot that you see there.

So, that’s really what this post is about. As I’ve said on a number of occasions in this space, 2012 is going to be the best year in our history as a company. Why? Because we’re really becoming a different company. We’re re-writing our story; re-setting our corporate personality and becoming something altogether different, better. We’re doing this with a new platform called Spring and the early work is complete. As we’re saying around the office, “we’ve reached the end of the beginning”. If this were a race, we’ve just rounded the first turn and are heading into the backstretch.

Our purpose in NYC was to have conversations with the key people that will help make this next stage in the Spring development meaningful. I can’t really say more than that at the moment, but I can share with you a few tidbits from a recent demonstration here in the office. Every few weeks, our COO and CTO host brief demonstrations on the Spring platform to give the whole company a peek at the latest work. It’s an important time for our developers to take center stage and proudly display the fruits of their labor.

The most recent demo was just a few days ago. Naturally, I can’t divulge much, but let’s just say that there were more than a few “wow” moments from the sales team. I know you expect nothing but glowing reviews from me when talking about development of the new platform, but as anyone in software will tell you, the in-house staff (especially sales) are the biggest and most vocal critics. If I weren’t impressed with what I saw at the demo, I wouldn’t bother to write about it. But I was. The more I see, the more my confidence grows.

Because you’re reading this, I know you understand generally the process by which software is created. There’s current work and there’s the forecasted workload, also known as those things any software package must do to be useful and therefore marketable and ultimately profitable. This, my first post of 2012 is a proud one. I’m announcing that the forecast looks great. The workload is large but not as daunting as it seemed last June. Much of this is due to our great customers, our amazing team of developers our legendary support staff and our leadership team.

We have new internal deadlines that at one time seemed to me a little too ambitious. Now I’m not so sure. Sorry to stray into the whimsical here. It’s easy to talk about “the future” from way back in 2011. Now that 2012 is here and those bright yellow marks on the calendar don’t require as many clicks to find, it’s exciting. Seeing the kinds of things I’ve been witnessing in our demos makes me happy and proud. Yes, I’m still plenty scared, but it’s also exciting. Stay tuned.

The latest Spring Demo

Almost 7,000 individuals/organizations have released commentary on what they feel the real estate market will do this year. Yes, we all know real estate is a driving metric in overall economic health. If you’re interested in where the global economy is headed, real estate (particularly US real estate) is clearly something to carefully consider, but are there really THAT many viable sources of relevant information on which to frame your professional opinion? Well, no. Many of those opinions are simply Internet filler. Google indexing chaff.

One that is not is Rob Hahn’s 2012 set of predictions. Here’s another I liked form newcommbiz.com. Both of these posts lean a little on technology, so you can understand why I gravitated toward them. That’s kind of our thing. Here’s my favorite (courtesy of @ARMLS). Not specifically real estate oriented, but long-term ramifications might affect your credit score and/or existence in the space-time continuum.

As for me I have a 2-sided prediction to make: Side One is that the landscape of MLS is going to continue to begin to change dramatically. Funny way to say it, but that’s the world we live in. I believe we’ll see the relative tiny population of people (superagents, big brokers and their brokerages) moving further away from traditional business continue to grow. The word is definitely out and the word is the consumer is the driver, mobile is the medium and all hands on deck against Zulia. In short, the early adopters looking for something to early adopt will latch on to the newest techniques and tools that speak to this new shift in emphasis.

The time is right for a new generation of techniques and tools and Side Two of my prediction is that our Spring platform is going to turn some heads in this regard, and very soon. There’s a tight window here and we’re about to jump through it with both feet, two arms and a lot of happy screaming. Let’s just leave it at that for now.

So, happy new year to everyone in the Solid Earth universe. We’re looking forward to really focusing on the @SpringMLS set of initiatives, which include development, marketing and all around discourse on MLS re-birth. The Solid Earth leadership team will be traveling to NYC to Inman Connect next week, but not before Matt and I head to New Orleans to root on the Tide. I’ll make no prediction there. Roll Tide.

“We do have things that need to be done, but one of our biggest problems is that our members don’t use half of what the system offers already.” Her point was related to education and the apathy toward improvement of personal skills of the industry in general. Remembering that comment, I am taking the other-side-of-the-coin approach.

Solid Earth’s primary selling point over the years has been that of customization. We’ve successfully marketed ourselves as your MLS’s personal team of developers that will go to great lengths to craft custom-tailored solutions – in almost all cases at no additional cost. It’s been a great way to win customers and maintain healthy relationships and thus lasting contracts. It has also led to something called feature creep. Please take a minute and scan through that article.

Feature creep happens in nearly all software at some point, to some degree. For example, Facebook was just accused of this in September and listening to my competitors and their customers, this is a familiar phenomenon in our industry across the board. Remember your first experience with MS Word? File > New > Start typing. Now open your copy of MS Word and notice the vast array of menu options that you’ve never EVER used. It’s called feature creep.

So, when I heard Mrs Outgoing express her concern that large amounts of current functionality was being ignored, I began to think of this in terms of MLS in 2012. What if all those unused features that we’ve worked so hard to include in our systems were our members’ way of communicating to us (and my client MLS Committees) that everything past some unknown development point was simply unnecessary. In other words, they’re not using X feature not because they don’t know how (or don’t care) but because they don’t need it. It isn’t necessary for them to do business. It isn’t MLS, to stay with our theme.

I could list you more than a few “vital” enhancements added to LIST-IT over the years that are now the dim, unworn corners of the system Mrs Outgoing is referring to. To be fair, I’m sure there are users out there that have immersed themselves in LIST-IT and leveraged every possible advantage it offers. For the average Josephine however, they use LIST-IT to accomplish a few specific tasks, then get out. All software works in this way. For example, you know I’m pretty hot on Spotify these days but I probably only use 50% of it’s total feature set. I listen to music. That’s it. They could add 1,000 other things related to listening to music, but I don’t care. The core is what I want and that alone is worth the $10 per month. Please don’t screw that up.

In the above article, Facebook is being accused of straying from the simple things that make it so great. At some point, unless they stop now, Facebook will cease being what we know as Facebook and become something slightly different. It’ll still do the basic things, but we’ll probably have to wade through some other crap to get there.

So I wonder, at what point has your MLS Leadership crossed over from focusing on the business essential to the business optional and then passed completely into the mundane or downright useless? Feature creep is just going to happen, especially in a client-driven development process, but a common vision and clear communication on that vision can help slow its progress.

Spring is MLS core, but better. Can we avoid feature creep? Nope. Can we build Spring in an environment where we try and avoid it or at least put it off for as long as possible? Yes. We’ll try.

Oh yeah, and it was illegal.

In 2000, band Metallica called foul and hired a team of lawyers to shut them down for copyright infringement. Turns out that musicians and their record companies didn’t want consumers getting their music for free. In a few months Napster was shut down and while it still exists as a pay service, it’s place as top-of-mind music resource is gone forever. The Napster idea was based on peer-to-peer access; a brief jailbreak prompted by one sharp kid that wanted what we all wanted – convenient access to valuable content. OK, yes it was illegal, but it rang a bell could not be un-rung, so to speak. That brief taste of freedom sparked the music industry to rethink their business model or die a slow death.

Then in 2000, Apple purchased a small music service called SoundJams and renamed it iTunes. The rest is history. For my purposes here, the most important thing iTunes did for the music industry is give them new life in the form of a price strategy. Because Napster gave you access to other music libraries on other PCs around the world, you just saw lists of songs. You no longer had to accept entire albums to buy music. iTunes works much the same way. You can buy an album for a one-click price, but people buy single tracks much more often – and $.99 is the accepted rate. So, for $1 per song, iTunes revolutionized the music industry by answering a most vital question. What is the consumer’s price threshold for a single song. Well, it’s a dollar. Apple gets a cut and so does the artist and label. It’s far cry from the days of $15 per album and a buy-it-all-of-nothing approach to selling music, but artists and their labels are still working.

Keep in mind that what brought this about was a kid with a lot of brains just wanting a way to get more music. A consumer starving for content.

Skip ahead to July of this year. Spotify is launched in the US. I downloaded it and I freaked all over again. For a mere $10 Spofity allows live streaming of any song you can imagine to your PC and/or smartphone. Let me put that another way. For $1o, you have access to nearly every piece of recorded music in history at your fingertips. I’m doing this now. I just typed in “Beethoven” and I’m now listening to his 8th symphony in F major. I just typed in “Tiny Tim” and now I’m listening to Tip Toe Thru The Tulips With Me. Ok, enough of that. You get the picture.

Spotify gives me unlimited access for a small fee. No, I can’t copy the music to my library or burn it to a CD, but who cares? It streams to my PC or phone whenever I call it up. Why do I need a hard copy? Spotify, the artist and label all get paid. Again, this is not the death of the music industry at all. It’s a shift in business model.

The point of all this is simple. The consumer has driven the once iron-clad music industry out of the shadows and into a new way of thinking and it wasn’t going to happen without Napster. Someone had to come along and toss a monkey wrench into the machine. The music industry was certainly not going to do this on their own. They were content with their comfortable, inwardly-focused model of distribution. Sound familiar?

So how different is our situation? How long is the real estate industry going to stay barricaded before someone throws in a monkey wrench and causes the mass-rethink necessary in the distribution process?

Don’t we already have our own Napster on the scene? Of course we do. There’s someone out there giving the consumer what they want and those among us (the national, state and local trade organizations, the national franchisers and local brokers and yes, MLS vendors) that see both threat and opportunity will prevail. We’re not doomed to die, we’re doomed to change. Why not death? Because much like the music industry, the product (the listing) has an origin that really, really matters. Zillow is a lot like Napster in that the content is readily available, but the quality of the content is a serious risk.

I just looked up my house on Zillow. It shows 1.5 baths. I have 2.5 and always have. Where did 1.5 baths come from? No idea. See?

Wouldn’t Napster have lasted much longer if they took music feeds directly from labels and began charging a small fee for the high-quality, non-corrupted songs?

As much as I wanted music, just having the music wasn’t enough. I wanted high-quality music from a source I trust. We all do.

Thoughts?

That work started about 8 months ago when we hired a CTO, switched to Agile Development and released an internal white paper on Spring. Then we told our clients. “Hey, we’re shifting our focus and here’s how and why”. Their reaction was understandably somewhat dubious. Who could blame them. But, they’ve been understanding and very patient – mostly. So, we’ve lost a few employees and gained a few, but our core group remains and I’m proud to say that while we’ve just completed the “end of the beginning” of the Spring development process, that process is underway and by all appearances sailing along beautifully.

Which brings me to NAR and what happend on the show floor this past weekend.

Keep in mind our booth is RIGHT up front. As soon as you walk in the main door of the show, you hit our gray carpet. As those doors opened on Friday night for the grand opening, I was a little edgy to say the least. As we saw client and industry friends, the anxiety turned to a sort of relief. All the things we felt like were gambles turned out to be right on target. Mobility is clearly going to win in this industry and sooner than we might expect. A consumer-agent portal is another innovation that appears to be gaining steam (thanks Bob Hale), the mantra of “giving the broker similar weapons as Zillow and Trulia” is a very popular sentiment these days and getting down to “what MLS really is” is something we’re all very excited about.

Demos of Spring went very well. No negative responses unless you consider saying “not yet” to someone really wanting it now a negative. The Solid Earth team really performed and I want to thank them very publicly here. We have plenty of work to do, but the path is a little clearer and we’ve passed a major first obstacle.

Here’s Greg Robertson’s interview with me from the show floor.

Here’s a recent article I love from Tom Flanagan at Inman. Mobility baby.

I had the privilege of listening to Geoffrey Canada a few weeks ago talk about our children, education and some of the hurdles we as a nation have in front of us. The depth of knowledge Geoffrey shared with the crowd at the Village of Promise event was profound and staggering at times. One quote stuck out for me and still does as I continue the conversation about education in my home, work and community at large. He said something to the effect of “Our education system is like New Orleans after Katrina. Everyone is looking for the Government to jump in and solve the problem, but no one has a plan. They aren’t coming.” He went on to repeat the statement 3 or 4 times pushing across the room of leaders here in Huntsville that if we don’t do something then nothing will be done because the federal government has no plan to save our education system. After getting back to the office I remember sitting down in Matt’s office and telling him that Geoffrey Canada was someone I could, with reckless abandon, quit my job and follow on a journey that would be 30 years in the making to redo our education system. He laughed, possibly nervously thinking don’t leave just yet we have a platform to build here.

It’s passion that moves me. Passion for improving or hacking something together that others have done and looking for a way to do it better or possibly even differently. This passion comes from inspiration that has as many sources as thoughts within a day, but I wanted to share a few of them with you:

• Coaches – I crossfit and my coaches continually inspire me to push on beyond that threshold and seek better accuracy, stamina, endurance, agility, power, and Coordination. This guy makes me want to tackle a bull.
• Authors, Poets, Philosophers – I’ve found an infinite source of fuel and inspiration in the one sentence quotes from men and women who have preceded us. I found this one today as I drank my coffee.
• Creation

Other forms of inspiration for me are start-up Communities and Maker Movement. TJ McCue defines the Maker Movement as “The people who create, build, design, tinker, modify, hack, invent, or simply make something.” It’s this idea of Makers that excites me about our journey to Seattle this week. The agenda is filled with speakers who are makers. The things they’ve accomplished are amazing and to be able to listen to them expound on ideas related to the technological business world we face today is truly a privilege and invigorating.

I asked the band of travelers going with Solid Earth to pick their top 3 topics that intrigued or created enough curiosity to make them say “yeah I want to listen to that”. Some had trouble, but everyone was able to narrow down the field to just a few speakers that really mattered to them. There was a diverse response from the group with some overlapping interests and thoughts. This is the beauty of interaction. You have ideas, I have ideas and when we pull those two together and interact we end up with something bigger than the individual. Scott Macklin puts it like this “When you have a body of folks participating in conversation around the work that you do, that’s where the validity comes from…” Shauna Causey puts is slightly different “the technology we are building, when we build it around relationships and people that’s when it’s successful”. Here is a brief list of topics we are interested in:

• Information Transparency: Empowering the Consumer Coup
• The Power of Connecting Search + Social
• Feeding People with Websites: From Digital Campaigns to Daily Bread

The full list is to much for this post, but stay tuned for more from our journeys. If you’re curious where I’m headed take a look at my schedule.

I’ll leave you with a few questions. When was the last time something inspired you to change the path you are on? Where do you find inspiration on a daily basis?

We have also selected beautiful Charleston SC as our location for next year.  Flights into Charleston are currently running about $500 round trip from Huntsville, $300 from New York. For the hotel, we have decided to reserve rooms in two different facilities with price points ranging from $159/night to $259/night.  We’ll have more information on those rates and locations soon.  We’re still looking around for meeting space downtown but there are many options that look good.