It’s the week of NAR 2019 REALTORS Conference and Expo, and a lot of attention will be on all of the product announcements, the Clear Cooperation Proposal, and the government scrutiny of our industry. Despite all the commotion, don’t forget to keep being strategic, and that strategic thinking is an ongoing process. This post is all about MLS innovation, partnership, and management.
After CMLS 2019, I read the book by speaker Gabe Klein, “Start-Up City” to see what lessons the real estate industry, especially MLS operators, could take away. I’m not saying that every MLS needs to learn all these lessons, but that many MLSs might learn from some or even many of them.
In the book Gabe shares the perspective of his time at a car-sharing company and from running the department of transportation in Washington DC and Chicago. Environmentally, and in terms of how much people hate traffic, the single occupancy vehicle is not working for us, and designing for more varied forms of transportation (pedestrians, bikes, scooters, etc.) supports greater real estate density. Transportation is an important part of any city: investment in this infrastructure has a positive effect for real estate and when streets are redesigned to be shared, business benefits and both safety and health increase. And when you build livable space around shared streets, real estate grows up around it.
One of the things that was interesting in the early part of the book was how Gabe described the interactions between his entrepreneurial beginnings and how he learned to work with government, which is a big soup of rules, regulations, and power structures. Having consulted to many startup companies over the last few decades, that’s exactly what MLS looks like to would-be real estate tech innovators. So, though there are both similarities and differences between what he was dealing with and what we have in our industry, Gabe’s thoughts on how government and startups can work together drew my attention. Can our MLSs leave room for “experimentation, learning, adaptation, and ongoing evolution”? Can they learn to better “assess their strengths and assets so they can effectively partner with the private sector and leverage what individual citizens do best in terms of systems, execution, innovation, creativity, and hyper-localization”?
Gabe found that, at the department of transportation, saying “yes” meant more work in an era of dwindling resources, which meant there wasn’t incentive to innovate or say “yes” when someone wanted to break from the status quo. And, stepping out on a limb meant increasing the risk of failure. How did Gabe deal with this, and what could some MLSs learn?
- Ask yourself, what was the last big MLS experiment? Consider what experiments the MLS might perform to further its mission. Licensing another product from the usual categories doesn’t count. Think of and position experiments as short-term, trial-and-error “pilots”, with milestone-based targets to measure against. If the pilot is successful, resources can be found to improve on it later and pay for that long-term or, if unsuccessful, the pilot can “fail fast”.
- Manage S.M.A.R.T. As a consultant performing a lot of strategic planning, I am always careful to ensure that strategies are linked with tactics, and tactics with at least some suggestions from the planning group for action plans and even Key Performance Indicators (KPI). The planning session provides the organization the “Specific” and “Measurable” parts of “S.M.A.R.T.” – but it’s up to the executive and their staff to follow up on strategic planning to study the planning report and agree to a balance of the scope, effort and time-based goals in order to add the “Agreed Upon”, “Realistic” and “Time-based” to the mix. Again, S.M.A.R.T. is:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Agreed Upon
- Realistic
- Time-based
- What does a specific and measurable goal look like? An example from the book is as follows: “In-House Construction led by Tom will fill 20 percent more potholes (16,145) this season by May 1 by leveraging Potholepalooza for public participation, new hot asphalt, and contract teams during peaks.”
One section of the book described marketing projects, communicating with the public (in the case of MLS, that would be subscribers) and celebrating your accomplishments. Some MLSs already are excellent at this, while others spend a lot of money and energy on projects that are not properly marketed to, or appreciated by, subscribers. I sometimes see this when I survey MLS subscribers and find they are not aware of projects or resources they have access to, and I think of this as “not spending the most important 5%”. My takeaways from this part of the book are:
- “Market just like the best in the private sector. Set a goal to be as good as your hero company, whether Starbucks, Virgin,” etc.
- “Involve the [subscribers] and much as you can so that they feel ownership and give you valuable input. It is their system.” That said, while listening is important, I believe it’s important for organizations to find the right balance of listening and leading.
One of the compelling anecdotes in the book was how a company fielding a mobile app named “Haystack” butted heads with and was shut down by the city of Boston. Haystack was an on-demand parking application and “Haystack failed to see the city’s basic obligation to ensure fair and equal access to public space. The city, meanwhile, was not prepared with a comprehensive vision for how to collaborate and leverage private-sector mobile technologies to increase parking turnover and revenue and make life better for citizens.” Takeaways for MLS are:
- By understanding the incentives and cultures that drive each side, the MLS and tech sectors can partner more constructively, and ultimately, work together to create a more innovative environment to benefit MLS subscribers.
- How do we help innovators understand the industry and the MLS in particular? I don’t think I have ever seen a published robust explanation of what the MLS is and does, its values and culture, and how it interacts with innovators. What data does the MLS have and how does data licensing work? What is IDX and VOW? What other kinds of innovations might someone talk to the MLS about? Is there a guide for what types of innovations might be met with approval? What should an innovator expect the approval process to look like? I’m sure that’s just a starting point for how we could help the tech sector understand the MLS incentives and culture, and perhaps inspire collaboration and innovation which could benefit subscribers.
- A partnership “needs to be built on clear expectations, S.M.A.R.T. goals and a solid contract, but equally important is a healthy, respectful working relationship among all parties”.
What can MLSs learn from someone who ran a government agency focusing on transportation? Possibly a lot! It’s like CMLS 2019 keynote Ross Shafer said, “Crash a conference at a hotel near you. You might learn something from outside your industry… What’s the worst that could happen – they put you in conference jail?” Many thanks to Gabe Klein for his insights, which inspired some of my own.