Closing on 2007 means closing a major turning point in my life. In one short year, I've had another son, built a house, left one great job for another, gotten remarried, made new friendships, lost old ones, deepened my involvement with RETS, and set about building the best MLS in the country. It truly has been a pivotal time in my personal history.
RETS, RETS, RETS
A good portion of my brainpower this past year has been focused on improving RETS, the Real Estate Transaction Standard(s). It's simply fantastic to be involved in such a high-profile standard with so many great Real Estate technology professionals. My thanks particularly go to the rest of the "core" Schema team: Paul Stusiak, Gina Accawi, Peter Spicer, Michael Wurzer, Gregg Petch, Eric Petersen, Sergio Del Rio, Chris McKeever, Joshua Vosper, and Jaison Freed.
It's also easy to overlook the wizard behind the curtain, but a great debt is due to Mark Lesswing. In a single year, he's transformed a motley crew of interested participants into a gen-u-ine organization. Beyond this, his grasp of the technology proposition to Real Estate is virtually unparalleled. Regardless of his other accomplishments, it's hard not to consider him one of the great RE technology luminaries of this decade.
On a related note, Michael Wurzer (RESO Chairman and President & CEO of FBS) posted an open letter to the mass listing aggregators of the world. Proving the value of the Web 2.0 world, enough responded that some sort of open discussion will take place at Inman's Connect NYC. Mike's certainly shaping up to be a luminary himself.
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My consequential involvement with RETS is the Query language, dubbed RQLX (although it's a bit of a grandfathered name that lacks significant meaning). Through numerous posts between myself and Sergio Del Rio on the RETS-DEV mailing list, I countered the necessity of a number of staid data archetypes (dictionaries and vocabulary) in RETS 2 that existed largely to resolve the problem of unique particle attribution in RETS 1.x. The reality is that the RETS 2 Schema have evolved into a fairly monolithic namespace, which makes UPA a distinct reality without needing alternate representations of the data set. My only wish is that I could learn ANTLR well enough to (quickly) write a functioning, provable grammar... but I'm getting there.
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How to Build a Great MLS in 10 Easy Steps
As if. As much as my background may have prepared me for this effort, building the new, ground-up version a large-scale MLS is no small feat. Amidst the travails of the past two months, moving 1200 miles and traveling nearly 20000 more for various professional and family events, I've also had to re-align and rebuild a development team for MLSPIN's next great release in 2008. I have two open development positions if anyone's interested (or if you know someone) with ASP.NET and heavy MSSQL skills.
Thanks to Microsoft's [un]timely releases of VS.NET 2008 and, more significantly, LINQ, I also have about two weeks to decide whether we write against the (proven) ASP.NET 2.0 platform or the far more streamlined ASP.NET 3.5 platform. Any insight or feedback is also welcome.
On the corporate side, I can't understate enough how valuable it is to have faith from your leadership: with Kathy Condon (my CEO) and Tony Mastroianni (my CTO) providing such solid backing, I'm confident we're going to release a monumental MLS system and make significant strides in raising the MLS bar. To that end, I also owe a bit of thanks to Michael Wurzer (FlexMLS) and Colby Ackerfield (RealGo), both of whose candor and guidance is deeply appreciated.
Family Notes
Lucas is nearing his first birthday, growing into a character of his own by the day: He's such a great baby. Ben just started Montessori school and continues to amaze us with his intelligence and compassion. Kerry is continuing to acclimate to the geography (New England's a far cry from the Southwest) and a new station in life as a stay-at-home mom. I probably don't tell her enough, but she's held up wonderfully. I couldn't ask for better kids or family, period. Almost all of our Illinois houses are sold and that will be a great relief as we look to buy a house next Spring. It's all coming together, finally!