MOVE puts on the white hat.

Recently I wrote a post about “What’s MOVE’s next move?”.  The following week Curt Beardsley, a VP at MOVE,  did a lot of demos to news and industry people about what they’ve been working on.  My business partner Dan Woolley and I were lucky enough to get a demo.

Dan and I have known Curt for quite a long time.  In a nutshell Curt’s first company, True North Technology created the first web-based MLS system.  Yup, that’s right he invented the internet based MLS system, take that Al Gore!!  They were bought by GTE Enterprise Solutions, creators of T-III, which is where he met a guy named Errol Samuelson.  Errol now is the president of Realtor.com.

Anyway we were lucky enough to  get a demo of new tool for real estate professionals they call, “Find“.

The first thing I have to say about Find is that its freaking awesome! The way it blends public records data, MLS data, on the fly heat mapping, and pychographic data just blows your mind.  But MOVE figured out that the key to understand this data is centered around the way you search.  You might even say that you need to make sure you can “FIND” what you are looking for!  I’ve seen other sites/products that try to pull off the natural language searching and most have failed.  Find nails it.

Find is intuitive, fast and as a software developer inspiring.

But the technology is only half the story.  It’s up in about 40 MLS providers around the country and it’s free to REALTORS. The only catch is MOVE would like MLS providers to provide their sold data to MOVE.com to implement the solution.

And what does MOVE what to do with this sold data?  Sell it to direct marketers?  No.  Use it to build AVMs?  Nope.  Slice and dice the data and create derivative products for the mortgage industry?  Not even close.

Here’s what they want to do:

Improve the consumer search experience on Realtor.com.

That’s it!  In a nutshell, make the National Association of REALTORS flagship site, Realtor.com, (already #1) even better.  I’m surprised that more people aren’t writing about this.

In the past the industry has been pretty vocal about what it doesn’t like about Realtor.com.  I’m sure that there will still be a lot of Realtor.com “haters” out there, but with all the hype around MLS data it’s refreshing to see a company who is focused on improving their service and creating new tools that give real estate professionals back the edge. And that’s definitely something I agree with.