The email hit my inbox Thursday night at 5:43 pm. The subject line read: EMBARGO: You’re Invited to Attend a Private HouseLogic Webinar Tomorrow. The body invited the distribution list to a 2 hour private webinar on Friday afternoon with a teaser saying that the listener would want to stay tuned for the second half when some big news would be unveiled. Let’s just say my curiosity was peaked and I listened in on Friday.
That call marked the unofficial launch of the National Association of Realtors, Realtors Property Resource or RPR. RPR is a national property database initiative with a back end Realtor component and a consumer facing website called HouseLogic. It will be officially launched this week in San Diego at the NAR conference.
Since Friday afternoon the webosphere has been buzzing with speculation, opinion and reactions to the RPR pre announcement. If you have a few minutes to dedicate to reading here are some interesting posts on the topic that have surfaced over the weekend.
- RPR Madness! NAR Unleashes National Property Database with Cyberhomes from Brian Boero at 1000Watt Consulting
- Run Altos Run! NAR Announces RPR from Mike Simonsen at Altos Research
- The Coming Civil War in Real Estate: The RPR Saga Begins from Rob Hahn at Notorious R.O.B Blog
- Will Realtors Property Resource (RPR) Drive Up the Cost of Referrals? by Matt Stigliano on Active Rain
- Breaking News: NAR/RPR + Cyberhomes = by Jim Duncan on Agent Genius
Will RPR be a good thing for our industry? Time will tell.
Should agents and brokers know everything they can about this initiative? Absolutely.
I’ll hold my opinions and continue to share information…
Do you have an opinion on RPR you’d like to share?
Lets just hope that it has more listings than the other "national property databases" like Google real estate and zillow.
-Tyler
Thus far I see the RPR as another NAR attempt to take their "captive" clients, basically, us Realtors, and use us to provide data for a business model that will make NAR and the technology partner loads of money. I wrote a post on it at my blog here.
http://www.affinityproperties.com/wordpress/2009/…
I'd love to know what others think.
Thanks
Joe Cline
Austin Texas Realtor