by G. Sax, Head of Communications, RESO
It was great visiting with Jeremy Crawford, CEO of First Multiple Listing Service (FMLS), to ask about his perspective on RESO seven years after he was its CEO, how to go about staffing an organization and the good that comes from healthy competition. Enjoy!
Q1: You were once the CEO of RESO. Now that you are several years removed from it, can you reflect on what you gained from that experience and share how you feel about RESO’s role from your current perspective as the CEO of a large MLS?
Jeremy: Personally, I gained a tremendous amount of learning. When I was its CEO, RESO was new to being a corporation separated out from the National Association of REALTORS® (NAR). We were in heavy growth mode for membership, standards development and mandates to adopt standards. Being the first CEO, the leadership team around me did a phenomenal job of getting me up to speed.
Art Carter, the CEO of California Regional Multiple Listing Service (CRMLS), was a tremendous help for things like establishing membership dues. The RESO conferences became full conferences and not just workshops at the NAR building in Chicago.
I learned about what being a startup was like, staffing, building out the team, building out a revenue model and building out the standards. It was a major personal development for me, and it helped me get my position at FMLS. Now, at FMLS, we do a lot with standards development. Our board is very knowledgeable about RESO standards and goals.
What we built and evolved at RESO is now being applied to FMLS data shares. We support putting standards-based listings into multiple MLSs. It creates a playbook for them to do it in other organizations. I don’t know why it would be a secret. The only way we can do that efficiently is to use RESO standards and the RESO Data Dictionary. All of our new data feeds are RESO Web API. There are only a couple that are RETS-based, because we’ve given our vendors quite a bit of time to transition.
I was instrumental in trying to diversify RESO when I was there. We tried to work with MISMO [Mortgage Industry Standards Maintenance Organization] and attempted to acquire an apartment industry standards organization. They had a good set of standards, and we had it set up for them to have their own working group. At the finish line, CoStar came in and bought them out from under us. That was around the same time that Apartments.com was acquired by CoStar, and they wanted to control the actual standard.
We also worked with other ancillary entities. I’m a big advocate for home energy use and sustainability and worked on a home energy acceleration program with the Department of Energy and the Council of Multiple Listing Services. We met at the White House. We tried to incorporate that effort into the standard, working with Pearl and other entities.
There needs to be attempts to diversify. We need more input and membership from tech vendors and brokers to advance the standard beyond MLSs. I see RESO as no different than Bluetooth. RESO should look at the reasons why fierce competitors like Apple and Samsung belong to the Bluetooth organization. These are two companies that control the cell phone space. They could each decide to not support Bluetooth and do things on their own, but they don’t. Why is that? RESO should explore that.
Bluetooth is phenomenal. The RESO Data Dictionary is phenomenal. You have something like 80 percent of the marketplace using the dictionary. How do you get to the next 10 percent? Look at Bluetooth to track your next steps. Maybe it’s working in other standards. Look at something like OpenID Connect. Build some synergy with new companies and strategically think through those things.
Education is an important pillar, and I think that building up the RESO RED courses is a good move. The most surprising thing I learned when I became CEO of FMLS was that the FMLS Training Institute was exceptionally developed. Most MLSs do not do continuing education-accredited training. But when you offer CE that allows agents to get their license renewed, that fulfills an important need.
Last year, we issued more than 18,000 CE credits in Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, South Carolina and North Carolina. We teach CE accredited courses, and we are ARELLO-certified, giving us additional clout. I want to shout out our Director of Training, Bethany Beaudrie, for doing such a good job.
We have 36 hours of CE you can get annually. We utilize self-paced learning through TalentMLS, and we don’t overstep association-driven CE. We teach mobile real estate, cover transaction management – the list goes on and on, and there is room for RESO to keep growing in that realm as well.
Q2: MLSs of the size and caliber of FMLS require staff. Prior to your time at RESO, you were with MLSListings and Sandicor, two large MLSs in California. But during the time that you were CEO at RESO, there were just a handful of full-time staff. How do these situations compare, and how do you suspect that staffing will evolve as AI continues to get better at fulfilling traditional staff roles at larger organizations?
Jeremy: I was the only W-2 employee when I started at RESO. From there, we grew the team to manage operations, certification and workgroups. We were a small staff and wore many hats. At Sandicor, associations did the billing, so we didn’t have to worry about that. MLSListings was different for me because they had a software engineering team, they had their own customer support and they did billing. We still wear many hats at FMLS. We have 60 full-time employees, which is actually small for MLSs of our size.
We do 80,000 to 100,000 support calls per year by phone with a 94% annual approval rating. Our team is very efficient. That’s where I would like to come in with AI – adding it for operational efficiency. If there is attrition and existing staff don’t think we need new staff, we might backfill that with AI. We use Lundy to help with that, and we have gone from an average of 130 seconds of wait time to 90 seconds, with a goal target of 80 seconds. And we’re doing that with the same or less staff and the same call volume.
We’re getting through calls faster with AI routing tools that are more efficient. Our marketing team uses AI for PR, newsletters and other methods of communication. What we’re communicating out now is 10 times greater than it was before help from AI. It’s made us more efficient at getting stuff out the door.
AI is embedded in our Zoho, Constant Contact, product updates and training updates, and I think that MLSs need to embrace AI at that level. We have staff that are trained in the MLS industry. We’re a niche industry, and that’s where we can use AI to help with things like compliance violations and data integrity.
We care about the data being as clean as possible. That’s what our compliance is about. We send courtesy notices. We do fine for violations, but that is a miniscule part of our business. Our goal with compliance is data integrity. We want more data and the most accurate data, and we’re doing that with AI systems all over the place. And of course, our IT department is using AI. That’s kind of a given.
Q3: You seem to be drawn to highly competitive MLS markets. I think we can agree that competition is good for the consumer, but is it good for standards, and can you elaborate on your experiences with creating meaningful standards amidst spirited competition?
Jeremy: FMLS began in 1957 by eight brokers, meaning next year is our 70th anniversary. Those brokers put us together to cooperate against competitors.
What we have in Georgia with FMLS and Georgia MLS is the most competitive scenario in the MLS industry. Most MLSs have zero competition. I think that competition in any industry is good. Let’s think of it like pumpkin spice latte. Trying to become the first coffee shop to announce your pumpkin spice offering has become important to some people. Who cares? The fact of the matter is that there is now a pumpkin spice standard for the fall of coffee. It has become a fall standard. The standard is what people expect, the competition is the whipped cream on top.
If we don’t do everything we can for our brokers and agents, we lose customers. This is a little different compared to other markets. There are other competitive situations, no doubt. Rhode Island may have a statewide [or State-Wide, as the case may be] MLS, but Bright MLS is just down the road. There is also a lot of cooperation amongst MLSs. I think of the New York State Alliance of MLSs, which is a cooperative between MLSs in Rochester, Buffalo and Syracuse.
As relates to standards, I go back to Apple, Samsung, JBL – fierce competitors that collaborate through Bluetooth. Without it, they would not have interoperability between their products, like Apple’s stupid Lightning cable. Thankfully, the European Union said we are going to standardize this cable crap with common-charger regulations. That’s a policy mandate that is good for consumers.
For years, Apple was not creating anything new, but now they have a new flip phone. Standards created the ability to innovate. Just like the USB-C standard is helping Apple and Samsung to differentiate themselves, FMLS and GMLS both use RESO standards as a baseline for our own unique innovations.
I think that’s where the industry will continue to evolve. We’re doing so many data shares, and we’re doing it for the benefit of maximum exposure, which brings a benefit to our brokers and agents. We have brokers in every state. We do it because that’s what the members want. There are agents that practice in San Francisco and Atlanta. By helping those agents with data shares, even globally with GDX, for the good of our customers and end users, we’re being competitive.
Three Questions is a lighthearted interview series that features real estate industry professionals, their businesses and how they interact with real estate standards.
