RPR and HouseLogic: Projects of Striking Scale

By Robert Freedman, Senior Editor, REALTOR® Magazine
So many announcements are made at NAR’s annual meeting that it’s easy to lose sight of just how trend-shifting some of them are. At the opening forum of the 2009 REALTORS® Conference & Expo in San Diego yesterday, NAR CEO Dale Stinton made back-to-back introductions of two initiatives that stand to define how you’ll do business in the years ahead.
The first is the REALTORS® Property Resource, something NAR leaders first started discussing several years ago then gave the go-ahead about two years ago as part of NAR’s massive Second Century Initiatives.
When it launches in the second quarter of 2010, it will be a database of 147 million parcels of real estate accessible to all REALTORS®. For each parcel you’ll have quantitative data—size, assessment, and so on—plus qualitative data: comments from you and your colleagues on what’s really key about the property.
Any database that has 147 million of anything is a massive resource; when the data consists of the amount and quality of the information that Stinton describes, you really get a sense of its scale. It will put an unprecedented amount of informaton at your fingertips, making you a go-to resource for your customers that would have simply been impossible years ago. If you think about it, it’s exactly the kind of thing that associations should be doing for their members: pooling their resources to undertake massive projects that shift the long-term competitive landscape in their favor. Read more