The Golden Record

I began working with associations and multiple listing services in 2012, just after I left Inman. Very shortly thereafter, I started consulting with associations and MLSs on member engagement, which was a huge concern then as well as today. My very first client was Stellar MLS, and my second was the Hudson Gateway Association of REALTORS®, and I’m proud to say that they’re both still clients and great partners and friends. I love this business and all the people who work in it. There isn’t a more dedicated, decent, hard-working group of people in any other industry, and I feel lucky that my career led me here. But there’s one thing I don’t like about our industry. And a lot of other people hate it too. The thing I hate is this industry’s data . The state of data in our industry is still a mess. And that results in lousy member engagement because the data about members is trapped in legacy systems. While RESO has done an admirable job of building and enforcing standards on the listing side of things, the member data that comes out of the various association management systems (Rapattoni, RAMCO, Relevate, GrowthZone, etc.) is proprietary, chaotic, and incredibly hard to work with if you don’t happen to have a developer on staff. Since the vast majority of our clients don’t have a large technical team, or anyone technical at all at their disposal, they’re stuck with non-standard data that lives in legacy systems they can’t easily use. There’s simply no easy way to marry member data with listing data, which is the only way to paint a complete picture of the members of MLSs and associations. So if you can’t use all of your data to understand your members, how can you engage them? Member engagement needs connected data If you can’t use all of the data you have to engage your members based on who they are, what they do, and where they do it, you’re operating with one hand tied behind your back. You’ll never achieve high member engagement because you won’t be able to create relevant communications that mean something to your members. Think of it this way: REALTORS® buy, sell and rent real estate, but they also contribute to RPAC, earn designations, take continuing education and pay their bills. When you unite what agents do (transact) with who they are (member data), you unlock new possibilities to authentically engage your members because you can market to them based on their behavior, performance, and interests. But to be clear, we’re talking about more than REALTORS®. You have all kinds of members, including affiliates, appraisers, commercial, MLS-Only members, non-REALTOR® members and many more. Membio engages all those types of members too. We are connected data platform first, meaning that we can accept and integrate with all types of data sources. And that, my friends, is why we’ve spent the last two years building Membio. It’s the first connected data platform in organized real estate that natively combines listing data from any RESO-standard feed and member data from all of the major association management systems, so you can finally conquer member engagement. What does this mean to you? When you work with Membio, you can finally start using all of your data to profile and engage with your members. You can send them the right thing at the right time and know whether they’ve looked at it or not. You can segment your members based on dozens of factors. To say this is a passion of mine is an understatement. In one way or another, I’ve been working on this for at least eight years. But now, we have exactly the right team to bring our vision into reality. Between Gopi Dhanakodi’s big data expertise, Paula Gordon’s product brilliance, Daniel Pratt’s lovely user interface and a crew of excellent engineers (Srini Paluri, Dale Sikkema, Evans Gacheru and Rajeev Reddy), and an operations expert like Rogelio Avalos holding everything together, we’re destined to introduce amazing products and services that will help transform our clients’ data into an incredibly useful asset that will help them truly engage their members and thrive well into the future. Over the coming months, you’ll start to see Membio’s new platform in action for clients including OneKey™ MLS, the Hudson Gateway Association of REALTORS®, and the Mainstreet Organization of REALTORS® … some of the largest and most progressive organizations in our industry. We can’t wait for you to see it.