I really like Seattle, and I like it more after this week. Early Sunday, Julie gave me a ride to the airport for a pre-dawn Delta NonStop from RDU to SEA. I flew out to attend the Council of Multiple Listing Services annual meeting CMLS2024 held this year at the Hyatt Regency. The same hotel where NAR’s AEI event was held a few years ago. It’s hotel and conference center are new and very nice and are located just a few blocks from the City’s historic Pike Place Market and waterfront.
The event is the only national conference specifically for Multiple Listing Service people. MLS is also Major League Soccer, which is what most people think when I say MLS, but this is not that. This MLS is the most fair and open housing network in the world and almost no one knows about it. Believe it or not, this industry has been working for years trying to make property search work better and American MLS is now the envy of the world. In the US and Canada and now in Mexico and other countries, MLS has matured into networks of hundreds of cities. Much has been done over the years to improve the organizations, to standardize the data, and to promote the value of MLS in these markets.
Millions of consumers, over a million Realtors and Real Estate Professionals, hundreds of thousands of Brokerages and related companies all rely on MLS. Plus essentially all Appraisers, Mortgage Companies, Home Inspection, and Property Management Companies. CMLS pools resources so that MLSs can invest in good Governance, progressive policymaking, and innovations in technology and law that make homeownership more attainable.
The organization started in Seattle and was once called the Northwest Council of MLS. This is an Inman article about the founding back in 1998, the year me and Bob Moore started Solid Earth, an MLS software company. Since then I’ve been to almost all of the annual meetings in places like Estes Park and Colorado Springs in Colorado, Indianapolis, Boise, Louisville, and I am forgetting a dozen more.
This year, I attended not as a vendor as usual, but in my still new-to-me role as the Executive Director of doorifyMLS, formerly Triangle MLS. For twenty-plus years organizations like doorify were my customers when I ran an MLS software company. Now I get to help manage and direct the way MLS is done in our 16-county area for about 15,000 Realtors and Appraisers. In the years I’ve been attending CMLS, now from two perspectives, I’ve learned quite a bit. Relationships matter more than anything, no surprise. Tech changes all the time, rules change all the time, nothing moves as fast as the smart people say it will, so everything takes forever and costs too much.
Apparently, in my new role, applying Agile, and trying to make the company run more like a business is working out. The wonderful people at CMLS awarded me with the Peter Shuttleworth MLS Executive of the Year Award for 2024. I was too shocked to speak at the moment and did not get to thank all of the people who made the award possible. CMLS gave me that, in part at least, because of the big splash we’ve made at Triangle/doorify in the last couple of years. We are part of changing the way MLS software is delivered to Real Estate professionals across the country with our Choice Project. Other MLSs have seen what we did and they are all talking to their vendors about opening doors they thought were closed.
So thank you to my amazing team at doorify, tech, comms and member services were all stretched professionally and personally. Thanks to the Board for paying for it and not freaking out all that often. Thanks to the Stakeholders for sharing and carrying the message out to your people so well. And thanks to the Subscribers who understand what we are doing and send us those wonderful notes.
