Just a quick note: AAROnline.com will be down intermittently on Saturday, February 4 and Sunday, February 5 from 10:00am to 2:00pm. We apologize for the inconvenience.

An Open Letter to the AAR Family:

It is with a heavy heart that we share the passing of our friend and 2012 AAR President-elect John “Jack” Woerner with you. Jack was an agent with Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage. In addition, he was a Past President of the Green Valley/Sahuarita Association of REALTORS^® (2004), AAR Region Five Vice President (2007-2009), and 2012 AAR President-elect. Jack was to be the 2013 President of the Arizona Association of REALTORS^®.

President-elect Woerner was a friend, mentor, leader, father and husband who will be missed by so many. Our thoughts and prayers are with his wife, Jan, and his family.

As details for his services become available, we will be sure to share them with you.

If you didn’t know Jack personally, you missed a special opportunity to connect with a kind and honorable soul.

Sincerely,

Holly Mabery, 2012 AAR President
On Behalf of the AAR Board of Directors and Staff

AAR has not been receiving email since 10:00am today (Wednesday, 1/11).  The problem is due to a corrupted Internet domain mail (MX) record hosted at one of our vendors. Our website, www.aaronline.com, is currently functioning. Rather than moving our domain records to another vendor, we are going to wait overnight to see if MyDomain corrects the email issue. Unfortunately, shifting the full domain record would result in 24-48 hour interruptions in service to almost all AAR Internet services, which is something we want to avoid. We apologize for any inconvenience and will continue to closely monitor this situation.

For more photos, scroll down to the slideshow at the bottom of this post.

AAR’s annual Leadership Conference provides inspiring education for REALTOR® leaders at the state and local levels. This year was no exception. Jason Schechterle shared his empowering, positive story of triumph over adversity. (See beyondtheflames.com.) And Adorna Carroll, a dynamic association educator and facilitator, brought much needed clarity to governance and leadership issues.

In the post-event survey, we asked attendees to share their top takeaways. Here is a selection of responses (attribution given where known):

• “Flash mobs can happen anywhere. Incoming local association presidents are optimistic, hopeful and excited to help their communities and associations take advantage of opportunities in the coming year. And $.70 of every dollar for RAPAC stays in the state and is the cheapest form of insurance I can have for my business.” – Holly Mabery, 2012 AAR President, Sedona/Verde Valley Association of REALTORS®

• “All members have passion. Find out what their passion is.”

• “Have director liaisons for all of the different committees. This allows all directors to have a role in more than just attending a board of directors meeting once a month.” – Mary Roberts, Lake Havasu Association of REALTORS®

• “Construct a demographic study of the association’s members for the purpose of marketing to different levels of membership.” – Netta Salazar, Western Pinal Association of REALTORS®

• “Leadership should meet before the general board meeting.”

• “The importance of our fiduciary roles as directors and officers of both our local and state associations!” – James “J.T.” Tsighis, Tucson Association of REALTORS®

• “Focus primarily on that portion of our membership that is engaged.”

• “We are all in this together. We need to remember to run our associations like a business. We all have challenges, and in sharing, we just might find solutions to what is happening in our own areas.” – Linda Huffman, Southeast Arizona Association of REALTORS®

• “Members need to know the outcome, not the discussions or who said what.”

• “I like the idea of layering the board committees and having a director liaison oversee those committees. This helps the board of directors see who may have great potential to serve on the board in the future. Plus, it gets your board members more involved.” - Yvonne Coelet, White Mountains Association of REALTORS®

• “Minutes, notes and all devices brought into meetings (including phones, iPads, laptops, etc.) can be subpoenaed.” - Jill Knox, Tucson Association of REALTORS®

• “It’s about your members, not about you!” – Kathleen Murray, Kingman/Golden Valley Association of REALTORS®

• “Rethink the idea of having board members move through the chairs. Put the best person for the job in the position. Not everyone wants to be treasurer!”

• “Review documents and make sure we are following our bylaws.” – Lynn Butler, Douglas Association of REALTORS®

• “Have a member of the board sit down with every new member of the association to go over what the board does locally, at the state level and nationally. Plant the seed to have them volunteer at a later date.”

• “Jason’s story was inspiring beyond words. His spirit and ability to convey a ‘can do’ attitude to an audience was phenomenal.” – Dru Bloomfield, Scottsdale Area Association of REALTORS®

Thank you to all who attended and participated in these important sessions!

Image Credit: NAR

Have you heard the news? NAR’s bus tour will be moving through our state over the next couple of days.

Here’s the skinny:

Phoenix, AZ

Thursday, October 20
11am – noon
Phoenix Association of REALTORS®
5033 North 19th Avenue #119
Phoenix, AZ 85015

Tucson, AZ

Friday, October 21
8am – 10am
TAR weekly meeting at PF Chang’s
1805 E River Rd. Suite 100, Joesler Village
Tucson, AZ 85718

Mesa, AZ

Friday, October 21
5pm – 8pm
SouthEast Valley Association of REALTORS®
1363 South Vineyard
Mesa, AZ 85210

The bus tour helps raise awareness for NAR’s Home Ownership Matters initiative. You can follow the bus tour via the Home Ownership Matters Facebook page.

If you see the bus moving through your area, snap a shot and share it with us in the comments below or on AAR’s Facebook page.

Will our industry direct its future or wait for change to move past us?

Volunteers and staff at AAR have been hard at work for several months developing two major projects: ARBI (Arizona REALTOR® Business Interface) and AZMLS (statewide MLS).

In August, AAR’s board of directors approved a plan to purchase ARMLS, a first step towards statewide MLS. However, the plans hit a snag in September when AAR received notice from SEVRAR that it would not sell its interest in ARMLS. Despite this setback, the momentum and enthusiasm for AAR’s statewide MLS keep growing, and we will continue to explore the options for moving this project to completion for the benefit of our statewide membership.

ARBI is a separate initiative from statewide MLS and is on track for a rapid development cycle. The data integration at the core of ARBI should result in significant improvements in efficiency for our members. You can read more about this project below.

AAR’s goal is to empower members to meet the challenges of tomorrow by harnessing the changes all around us today. Let us know what you think. Weigh in via the comments section below or email statewidemls@aaronline.com.

Tom Farley
AAR Chief Executive Officer

What is the Arizona REALTOR® Business Interface (ARBI)?

As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words:

Click to view a larger version of this image.

Here you see a mockup of what ARBI might be.  While the final result will look different, this diagram illustrates key features.  The virtual pathways at the extreme right of the diagram signify the many possible two-way channels into the dashboard, including MLS and public records, digital maps, electronic forms, digital signatures, Realtors Property Resource™ (RPR™), transaction management, iMapp, broker back-office support, third party applications and more.

Behind the scenes, information from all of the key applications is merged and redistributed to eliminate endless re-entry of the same information and decrease errors.  Although completely unseen by users, this data-integration is definitely the most complex portion of the ARBI project.  You may ask, “Why hasn’t this happened sooner?”

AAR’s approach to providing meaningful business services is to offer “best-of-breed” products in terms of security, usability and value.  This usually means different vendors.  Each vendor offers its own portal for data integration, but that means 14 MLS systems with each of three separate systems equals over 40 individual integration projects!  It’s no wonder that it’s taking so long to get all of the information flowing back and forth. Plus, it gets even more complicated: today, if a member wants to purchase CMA software, a mobile or iPad app, there is no guarantee that the software will work with their local MLS or even worse, multiple MLSs.  Vendors must obtain permission from one or more associations and possibly pay additional fees.

This approach is outdated and is difficult for vendors and members.  Consider the dilemma faced with, say, a CRM (customer relationship management) vendor… dozens of expensive integration projects with different vendors for one state?  Not happening. Enter ARBI, the “traffic cop” for all the information. With ARBI, AAR can now leverage its clout with its vendors to push them toward developing for a single interface.

At this point, it becomes clearer why a statewide MLS with one vendor makes so much sense with ARBI – one vendor, one integration and all MLS data in Arizona flows!  A CRM or mobile marketing vendor would then be able to code for one standard and be able to offer an integrated product for nearly 40,000 Arizona REALTORS^®.  That said, ARBI is important enough to stand alone, which is why AAR leadership chose to put it on a separate development track.  ARBI has been funded and will be completed, regardless of the status of Arizona MLS.

ARBI gives you:

• A single place to start a transaction – saves effort.
• Information auto-fills into other applications – saves effort and improves accuracy.
• A single place to check status for everything – saves time and effort.
• One central place to get information you need from the broker, the association, industry news sources, even the Department of Real Estate – saves time and effort.
• One username and password – saves your sanity.

Where are we now?

We have a sense of urgency in bringing ARBI “to market.”  The design team has decided on a “rapid application development” approach that presents a usable product to members at the very earliest date.  This technique is increasingly common with development of all size projects.  In it, a quick prototype release and long, open beta period brings a usable product to market quickly, then allows user input to shape ongoing development.

As mentioned, ARBI refers to not only the interface (the user screen), but the underlying technology that makes it all work.  The project will probably be developed in stages, beginning with the user interface (pictured) with stable, but basic underlying technology and moving into a refined user interface refinements with deeper technology development to enable further features.  Most of the technology changes will be invisible to users – users will just see more and more features as the system develops.

ARBI funding has been approved and ten major developers (including MLS vendors, e-forms vendors, transaction management vendors and general application developers) have been contacted to assess their interest and capabilities.  The ARBI Workgroup is working through proposals and determining the best course of action.

Moving forward…

Actual development should begin before the end of 2011.  Depending on a number of factors, members may see an initial version by the end of June 2012.  As mentioned, the approach will be to release new versions rapidly over the first year or so, refining and enhancing ARBI based on real user input.

On Friday, September 9, 2011, the Arizona Association of REALTORS® received notice from SEVRAR that their board of directors met and voted not to sell their interest in ARMLS to AAR in order to create a statewide MLS.  WEMAR also met on September 9, but at the time of drafting this post, AAR had not learned of their decision on selling their interest in ARMLS. The Phoenix and Scottsdale Area associations have submitted their approvals to sell their interests in ARMLS to AAR.

Since word started getting out on Friday about AZMLS’s status, AAR has received a lot of support for continuing our discussions on this important matter.  President Fouts is out of town, and I will be taking a week off starting Tuesday after 19-months of working on this visionary project.  Upon our return, we will sit down with those that have asked us to continue our discussions.

Personally, I want to thank those that worked so hard in investigating and designing the AZMLS Business Plan.  You did Arizona and its members proud.  While we may not cross the finish line, no one can say that we didn’t leave it all on the field.

My classroom is abuzz about whether or not to join in the statewide sharing of data of our listings. It’s to be an integral part of the AAR “Integrated Business Services Platform.” All the data in one MLS system. And for those of you who are members of ARMLS, you know and love FlexMLS. Listing Book, Noisy Neighbor, to name but a few…

So why would anyone NOT want to share their data?

Some of the negative reasons I am hearing:

“We’ll lose our market share.”

“Agents from the Valley will come up here and sell our listings.”

“Our area is different.”

“There could be hundreds of people going through our properties.”

“We’ll have to share our commissions.”

“How much control will we have?”

And then there are those positive reasons:

“Great! We can have a first-class MLS.”

“Our listings will sell faster with more agents showing them.”

“More showings and sales will bring down the ‘days on the market.’”

“I’ll pay anyone who brings my seller a buyer!”

“Wow! Listing exposure all over the state.”

“I told my sellers about this, and they wondered why we hadn’t done it before.”

As you might guess, I’ve left out many comments, and I have paraphrased a few comments to temper the tone or change the choice of words.

Let’s take these issues one at a time.

Does the Arizona Department of Real Estate give a license for a particular area or a particular specialty? Only for cemetery plot sellers, and of course, business brokers have some additional requirements.

Selling outside of our expertise…a huge issue. But is selling a house in the Village of Oak Creek (as an example) any different than selling a house in Anthem? Or the Arizona Biltmore? Of course, there are “issues” with any community, and HOAs can be drastically different in their rules and regs. But are there really issues that make selling property so different that we should limit a licensee’s ability to do so?

When I hear some of the negative reasons for not wanting a statewide MLS, I am reminded of the subagency days when we all represented the sellers. For those of us who are aged enough to remember those days, we remember how many agents thought buyer broker representation would be the ruin of our REALTOR® way of life. Actually, we became better agents, and we learned to better represent our clients. That’s the issue now. How we represent our client(s).

If we don’t go with a statewide data sharing or statewide MLS, are we giving our sellers the best exposure possible? Are we showing our buyers ALL the listings that might fit their needs?

What is our purpose as real estate agents? Maybe each of us needs to ask ourselves: “Who do I serve?”

Think about it…

AAR has put together an awesome array of member benefits that few state associations have offered their membership. Climb aboard…celebrate the delivery of services.

 To:     Arizona REALTORS^®

From: Duane Fouts, 2011 AAR President

Re:      NAR REALTOR Party Political Survival Initiative – Possible $40 NAR Dues Increase

The National Association of REALTORS® is proposing a new initiative – The Realtor® Party Political Survival Initiative. Have you heard the buzz???  This May, the NAR Board of Directors will vote on the proposal at the Midyear Legislative Meetings and Trade Expo.   The NAR initiative is designed to keep the Voice of Real Estate one of the most influential advocacy groups in America. Please take the time to visit the links below and educate yourself on the initiative.  To fund the effort, the REALTOR^® Party Political Survival Initiative proposes a dedicated dues increase of $40 for REALTOR^® Members.

To help provide you with the latest information and answer questions that have been raised, the 2011 NAR Leadership Team and 2003 NAR President, Cathy Whatley have announced that a live virtual Town Hall will be held on Wednesday, April 13th, from 11:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Arizona time. This will be an open discussion on the merits of this initiative to the membership.

To participate, register by clicking here.  Here are more important links:

• PowerPoint Presentation on RPPSI
• Learn more and provide feedback
• FAQs.
• More important background materials – resource page.

Please take a moment to register for the town hall and participate on April 13 at 11am.  Thank you!

An Arizona Association of REALTORS® Project