Doorify Real Estate Podcast

The Future of MLS Tech: AI, Data, and Broker Solutions with Daniel Jones

Doorify MLS Episode 82

From AI-powered listings to data standardization, what does the future hold for MLS platforms, brokers, and real estate professionals?

I sat down with Daniel Jones, CEO of Hive MLS, to talk about how our MLSs—Doorify and Hive—are tackling these challenges and shaping the future of real estate data and technology. Daniel and I have crossed paths at conferences for years, and we finally had the chance to sit down and talk about the challenges and opportunities we’re seeing in the MLS world. 

We got into the nitty-gritty of running MLS platforms, from structuring services and partnerships to solving data problems and integrating AI-powered tools. And, of course, we touched on the future of lockbox access, membership rules, and how MLSs can work together without losing their independence.

This conversation is just the start. There’s so much opportunity to improve MLS systems for brokers, and Daniel and I are both committed to pushing things forward. Listen in to hear how these changes could impact the way you work.

Specifically, this episode highlights the following themes: 

  • The role of AI in streamlining MLS listings and improving efficiency
  • How MLSs can better standardize and manage data for brokers
  • Challenges and solutions for cross-market access and lockbox management

Links from this episode:

1ae5b43598204883b524f061d4880e6d10fca88c (for podfollow.com)

Daniel Jones [00:00:00]:
We actually freed ourselves out of this mindset that we're cooperation, compensation. We've kind of freed ourselves from that mantra to be able to explore what else we can do. Data has a lot of value, so the more data you can collect, the better your standing is, the better your future is as an mls.

Matt Fowler [00:00:26]:
Hey, everybody, it's Matt Fowler from Doorify again, the podcast. And today we have my friend Daniel Jones from hive. Hey, Daniel.

Daniel Jones [00:00:35]:
Hey there, Matt. Thank you for having me.

Matt Fowler [00:00:37]:
Oh, man, I really appreciate you coming and talking to us today. We've got a wide ranging bunch of stuff to talk about. Daniel and I see each other at conferences. We were just at one. I saw you taking an iPhone snap of the slide because it was. We're talking about just full disclosure about MLS director, you know, CEO compensation and how that works in the industry. And I think Daniel was liking my number.

Daniel Jones [00:01:05]:
Yes, I was.

Matt Fowler [00:01:06]:
Yeah, yeah, we gotta stick together, man. There's only like 500 of us in the whole country that do this weird job. And we both work here in North Carolina, I'm in Cary and serve the Raleigh, Durham, chapel hill area, 16 counties up in kind of the North Central. And Daniel's like all over the place. You've got a big footprint in North Carolina, but you guys have expanded quite a bit and you're offering MLS services in some way. I'll get you to explain to us, to other MLs and just to kick us off today, I want to. We were just talking about metaphors and our subscribers don't fully understand, I think, how high the Doorify fit together, how the Flex MLS product can be in both companies, but the data is not the same. And, you know, like, how does that make sense? And I was trying to explain it to somebody and I said, look, it's like going into the movies, okay? So you buy your ticket and you go inside and get your popcorn and you go into one of the movie theaters and it's the same place you all went to the movies.

Matt Fowler [00:02:09]:
But when you are a realtor in North Carolina, you could buy a ticket and you can go into watch the HIVE movie or you can go in and watch the Doorify movie. And they're not the same thing and they have different things going on. And you can't just really, you can get up from one and go to the other if you want, but I mean, you're watching a different movie now. It's not the same. This very, very similar company, HIVE and Dorothy, but we have a group of what we're at like 14,000 subscribers now. And we serve five associations around the Triangle area with a data share with one of them. And you guys tell us a little bit about that. Daniel, what's the current state of the world at home?

Daniel Jones [00:02:51]:
Yeah, so we serve the counties. There are close to 50 counties, I believe three we have owners. So we operate wholesale to our owner MLs and associations. So we have 18 owners, nine of them. Well, half of them are associations, half of them are for profit. So that's our shareholders. And every shareholder just kind of brings equal representation to the board. We have the Flex platform and the Matrix platform.

Daniel Jones [00:03:24]:
We're working on bringing them together. But yeah, they're there for a while. For a long time. We were called NCR, MLS, NC regional MLS before we became HIVE. But everybody around us called us Flex.

Matt Fowler [00:03:38]:
Oh yeah, sure. Everybody just called you place. We did a survey, Daniel, a couple of years ago, and we asked people what MLS you remember? And a bunch of people said Paragon, right. Just the Black Knight product. And you know, I get that. I mean, it kind of like hurts a little bit right there. Like you don't even know who we are, what we do. I get that.

Matt Fowler [00:03:56]:
And that's what we're. We're talking about. People don't understand that they can log into the Flex MLS product. It looks like Flex. And when you log in as a hive member, you get a set of data that was created from your stakeholders with the rules that you have with all the, you know, the contractors that you have and the plugins and stuff that you've added to these different systems. In your particular version of that, you have your own membership rules and your own enforcement policies. These are things that we formally don't talk about, you and I, because we don't coordinate those kind of things for lots of reasons related to antitrust. But you, you have these set of rules, right? I mean there's 522 MLS is in the reso cohort.

Matt Fowler [00:04:45]:
So we kind of know about things. So yeah, about each other and how the MLS work. We're a little bit different model. I'm interested, when you said wholesale, does that mean that the like billing and support and stuff like that happens at the association level?

Daniel Jones [00:05:00]:
It used to, not anymore. So we shifted our focus. Support. While support happens at our level, the associations and mls that owners, they are welcome to provide support too. We work with them in our umbrella so they can be a local one. But some of our owners do not have that kind of staffing. And we're there to help out as far as billing. Billing does happen at the owner level, at the association or the MLS level.

Daniel Jones [00:05:29]:
Yeah, gotcha. Yeah, gotcha.

Matt Fowler [00:05:31]:
So that's a big part of the wholesale, is that they exactly collect the money and ship you your nickel, whatever, right?

Daniel Jones [00:05:40]:
Yeah, yeah. Our part. Yeah.

Matt Fowler [00:05:42]:
Yeah. So you're down in South Carolina now too, right?

Daniel Jones [00:05:45]:
I just hair because of Brunswick county is in. Had some Brunswick County. North Carolina has same Horry county in the past. And then our people in Georgia, they are in South Carolina. That's part of their service area as well. So we. We got a little bit of South Carolina here, a little bit of South Carolina and from the bottom too, I guess.

Matt Fowler [00:06:10]:
I was thinking of the Georgia Partnership. Then I was thinking South Carolina. It's Georgia, though.

Daniel Jones [00:06:15]:
That's right. That's right. So we have three owners in Georgia, Savannah, Augusta and Athens.

Matt Fowler [00:06:22]:
I'm really interested in what you said about bringing them together. You got CoreLogic and Flex now. And we've got, as you know, CoreLogic, Flex and Paragon. And we had Paragon before, so, you know, like everybody used Paragon. Then we had Allomance. MLS decided to merge their operations in with ours and they were using CoreLogic. So because we were able to straighten out the data on the back end, we were able to use CoreLogic and Paragon and offer both. And because we had Flex build our input forms for the new system, we were able to offer Flex as well.

Matt Fowler [00:06:56]:
Is that. Did CoreLogic come in through an association that signed up with you? Was that how CoreLogic happened?

Daniel Jones [00:07:04]:
Yeah, we try to be calm just as you are, and we'll work with you. Tell us what it's your dream could come true. What would it look like and how can we make that happen? And so they came to us with Core Logic of like, okay, tell me about this. We don't want to lose Core Logic. We like Matrix. Right? That's good. And Augusta is right in the middle. Athens and Savannah.

Daniel Jones [00:07:26]:
Who has Matrix, the Core Logic product? Augustus right in the middle with Flex. And so, yeah, so we're making it work for them. Their regional, their board, and then we incorporate it into our boards.

Matt Fowler [00:07:44]:
That is something I think we have in common, Daniel, the way we're approaching these data problems. We were able to offer three front ends now, four zenless launch today. That because we standardized the back end with Riso. I say that all the time and nobody knows what I'm saying. It's the real estate standards organization. R E S O Some people say Reso, some people say riso. There's a Big thing about that. But because we did that, we're kind of.

Matt Fowler [00:08:11]:
It doesn't work exactly that way, but kind of able to plug in different front ends. And there's one. We call it a Source of Truth. The official database underneath. In our case, that's Spark. And I think you guys rely on Spark a lot from FBS as well.

Daniel Jones [00:08:27]:
Yeah, we use Spark, so we're. We're working through that. There's Trestle Share is an option and Source Re. They are currently aggregating our data as well.

Matt Fowler [00:08:37]:
Yeah, we've been using trestle and the CoreLogic products. Our data is over there, too. I think that's another. Something we have in common is we're trying to solve problems for brokers using an easy button, if we can. And if the data is in Trestle and you're wired up to Trestle and you're like a Trestle person, then I don't want to disrupt that. I want to make sure the data is the same as it is in the Source of Truth. And that's not uncomplicated. Right.

Matt Fowler [00:09:05]:
Given the way the data is.

Daniel Jones [00:09:07]:
Right. Yeah. It's intensive and looking at the data, mapping it, and then there's people that want a tweak or a change here or there. And, you know, the ratio is constantly tightening up its standards, so you have to address that in multiple areas when you're trying to apply it to that whole convenience factor. There's more work on this end, but it pays off.

Matt Fowler [00:09:34]:
Yeah. I think we both agree that there's no. There's no choice to not do it. We have to move forward and we have to kind of work through these standards for so many reasons. It feels like I keep telling everybody those reasons, though, over and over again. But here's 2.0. We just went through the 2.0 exercise, and I don't know what yours was like, but ours, I think, because we just did it not long ago. There weren't that many changes from November 2023 to 2.0 certification this summer, I think we had seven fields, but it was because it was 100 before.

Matt Fowler [00:10:13]:
That was a heavy lift.

Daniel Jones [00:10:15]:
Yeah, we're. We're working through that. It doesn't seem to be too hard. It's just stay on top of the communication with the RESO through the year, which is what Liz has been doing. My staff, she's been communicating to our MLS board. I have a small MLS board set aside just this kind of focus, and they've been making adjustments over time. But then there's that whole balance, you know, don't want to make too many adjustments. So you frustrate the brokers, you know, and so.

Matt Fowler [00:10:46]:
And break everything downstream. Yeah. And work. Break everything downstream. But, you know, you can only wait so long before these things could get all built up. And Triangle had not. Triangle now, Dora had not started it and had not done much of the translation locality. The data was not in great shape.

Matt Fowler [00:11:04]:
We've made huge strides in fixing it. We still are going through. We have 20 something, almost 30 years of data. And that data came into the system through multiple conversions. That's like four different MLS platforms during that period of time, exported from one, imported to another, then exported from that one. So. And the rules changed too, over time. There were things that weren't required back in the day and there were things that were allowed open text fields where you could just put whatever in there.

Matt Fowler [00:11:36]:
We have gone through using AI and some other tools that are just more accessible now and found that all of our dates are logical. Like there are no list dates that occur after the sold date. Right. That wouldn't make sense if it's listed before it's sold before it's listed. Just because something got out of whack or somebody, you know, typed it in wrong. There's big issues though, with subdivisions and I guess let's move in that direction. Places that we know we can cooperate. I know our members that are watching this podcast would like there to be one movie.

Matt Fowler [00:12:13]:
We'd like there to be one set of things for them to deal with. And using the same metaphor, I think you and I want to do that too, but I think we want them to, like, metaphorically, we want them to watch my movie and then go to yours. You're going to have to buy two tickets. But we would like to, I think you and I can, in a bunch of different ways, put our data, the broker's data together in some common thing that you. That they could have access to. There are commercial products for this already that it looks at your membership in the mls, not what website you logged into. And if you're paid up in my system and paid up in Daniel's system and you log into either one of them, I think it's possible two or three different ways for you to get all of the search results that would go with your. The scope of your license and your membership, not the software that you're using.

Daniel Jones [00:13:14]:
Right. That would be my dream come true, actually. Yeah. That's why we're working with sourceres. Yeah.

Matt Fowler [00:13:21]:
Well, full disclosure, sorcery is my brother's company and some other folks. And Bill and I, you know, we're not working together anymore. I'm CEO of Doorify, and Bill has this software company, but we're doing the same thing. Right. So Bill is. Gave a speech, Clarity, that we just went to in Scottsdale in 2013. No, I'm sorry, 2011. 2011.

Matt Fowler [00:13:46]:
About APIs, about consumer portals, and about the importance of metrics in the MLS industry. And here we are 13 years, 14 years later, and we're still talking about this stuff. And it's now actually getting some traction. Bill's doing it for private company, but it's a very similar architecture because it's the industry's architecture. It's a standardized database with an API that you can plug stuff into. It's really not more complicated than that. And seriously, every other software business in the world works like this. It's just we've been relying on.

Matt Fowler [00:14:29]:
My talk at Clarity was about this MLS industry has been relying on the vendors too much forever. Like, if you want something done, it's you ask CoreLogic or you ask FBI Survives. The three big vendors in the space and really the little towns that have these MLS systems kind of go along with the vendor and do whatever they do. We've been preaching APIs and sovereignty for a while now that organizations that have some size to them. Yours, Daniel, mine, or the 33rd largest MLS in the country, according to the T360 report. I'm not sure where you guys are. You're. You're right in there somewhere.

Daniel Jones [00:15:10]:
Yeah, I think we're in the number 22 or something like that. I'm not sure.

Matt Fowler [00:15:14]:
We're like, yeah, big. Big enough to be able to do our own projects, and we have our. Our own copy of our data in a mirrored cloud service. Then we can. We have a RESO certification on the API. So it's better than the API that some of the MLS vendors have. And we have an API now that we can use for our own stuff. I just took a class on how to.

Matt Fowler [00:15:41]:
Just the very basics of how to start thinking about AI from a data network perspective. And this is super cool. I don't know if you've seen this or not, but they showed this diagram that I had on my Clarity presentation that says we're removed from a product value. Just mechanically, does it work through network value, where the more people use it, the more valuable it becomes. And now 92% of the transactions on Norfi last year involved competing companies. So that network effect is really Working where most people find their match through the network 92%. So we're moving away from that now because of modern computing into learning so that in a real time way like Amazon and Uber are Salesforce are well known to do. To put the engagement metrics of what, what is the house like? What is the house priced like that people are clicking on more today than yesterday and all of the engagement metrics related to those things to just usage of the system.

Matt Fowler [00:16:51]:
Email opens, open houses, scheduled lockboxes, unlocked appointments made, those are all engagement metrics. And if those are, what we're doing now is moving that data back into the database that we own and starting to build ways to learn from the things that we see happening on, on the engagement of the, of the properties. It's so important that the MLS retain ownership of that because if that activity is all happening out at your vendor, believe that it will be difficult to retain true ownership of that maybe more valuable information than even the property information on the daily.

Daniel Jones [00:17:33]:
Yeah, that'd be good stuff to retain. I'm all about getting that data and finding a way to make it help brokers in some way. My real goal is to be a partner to the brokers and our mls. So a partner in their success and play a part in that probably more than they realize MLS does. The MLS is already the tool for cooperation, but now that compensation is no longer in our mls, we actually freed ourselves out of this mindset that we're cooperation, compensation. We've kind of freed ourselves from that mantra to be able to explore what else we can do. Data has a lot of value, so the more data you can collect, the more, the better your standing is, the better your future is as an M and S. So I agree with that.

Matt Fowler [00:18:23]:
Yeah, for sure, for sure. I think what they enter to us is kind of a workflow where they identify the property and then we start telling them what we know about it as they tell us what they know about it. And we end up hopefully with something that's maximally marketable. Looking at the engagement metrics, I think we, with our prediction models we'll be able to tell you if uploading a photo of a different aspect might increase your success rate or. We just did a study that showed that houses that mention the word greenway in the public remarks sell an average of something like 60% faster than properties that don't have the word bring money in the marks. And it's, you know, I'm not saying make up greenways that there aren't any, but if you're in an area in our new input forms and you start to leave without using the words. We want to be able to tell you stuff like that. Yeah.

Daniel Jones [00:19:24]:
We'll maybe create an AI generator to say, is it in the greenway? Because there's an ideal remark for you, you know?

Matt Fowler [00:19:32]:
Yeah. Have you seen the Occucel ad listing?

Daniel Jones [00:19:35]:
Yes. So we are partnered with Dr. Shell.

Matt Fowler [00:19:38]:
Okay. I heard you were doing the rules engine. Are you guys going to do ad listing as well?

Daniel Jones [00:19:42]:
Yes, that's the goal. Right. So we're working with Flex and CoreLogic to make that happen.

Matt Fowler [00:19:49]:
That's great because we're. We are too. We're expecting to roll out in April. We should get the kind of. The first draft of it. I think it's this week. So this is great for our subscribers. Daniel, this is going to be.

Matt Fowler [00:20:00]:
You've seen this thing. It's amazing compared to that much not raining on Flex. But if you compare the Flex input form experience to this, to the OcuCell like Add listing workflow, that what you do to put a new listing in the system, there's just no comparison. I mean, the AI generated one is this smooth automated thing where you select the property from public records. It's like updated, fancy public records from real reports. And then you upload media, including video walkthrough it kind of generative AI. I'm describing it for our subscribers, Daniel. I know you've seen it.

Matt Fowler [00:20:35]:
Generative AI like, walks you through filling out a nice, clean, updated input form so you don't check the checkboxes. You kind of watch it do it. And then you get to a point where it says, okay, you're ready to do remarks. And it does generative AI remarks in a really nice way. And at the very end, it will let you do two really special things. One is to push it to social so you get through those APIs. A way to just from one place broadcast that property, as well as putting in the mls. But since you guys are doing it for a premium service, we'll figure out the money later.

Matt Fowler [00:21:12]:
At the end, you can say, look, I'm a member of HIVE and I'm a member of Doorify as well. Put it in both and it just. You get two MLS numbers and it matches the rule set of the receiving mls. So your rules are met your way. My rules are met my way. Maybe one day we should talk about looking at those. But for right now, functionally, for a broker who just has a house, he needs to get in the system right now. You enter it once and it's.

Matt Fowler [00:21:42]:
It's out in social, it's out in hive, it's out in door hive. If you edit, you need to edit it and you edit it through that portal. That's just super cool. And I think the fact that change.

Daniel Jones [00:21:51]:
This, go to one place, you're into it, go to one place to change your status and it's in all these MLs that are. That you are a member of, given that they are working with ocusel.

Matt Fowler [00:22:02]:
Right? That's right. I mean, you have to belong and you have to. And the MLS over there, wherever has got to have dyno rules on it and made their rules accessible programmatically in the way that Oki Cell needs. But that, that's just super cool. But that's going to blow people's minds, Daniel. I mean, there's things out there that are. Say I look at and I'm like, yeah, that's kind of cool. But this is different.

Matt Fowler [00:22:27]:
I mean, it's a different thing. Right. You know, somebody that was really spoke up to me about this was the property managers.

Daniel Jones [00:22:35]:
Okay, okay.

Matt Fowler [00:22:36]:
You know, so you put in a. On an apartment and they're used to not putting them all in because there's 500 of them or something, but now you can do this programmatically and then when you've got them in the system and you need to make a change to the remarks, maybe in all of them, you can do that programmatically through the system where you make the change once and say make it to all of them and it will go through and do that. It takes a second. But compared to how long it would take your assistant to open one and go the next one and over the next one, that's enough to make them quit. Yeah. You know, and you don't want to manage it that way. So this is just. It's a way to bring automation.

Matt Fowler [00:23:16]:
That's what all this standardization stuff's about. It's a way to bring automation to the workflows that we're doing. And stop the double entry and the pain points.

Daniel Jones [00:23:25]:
Exactly. Exactly.

Matt Fowler [00:23:27]:
I guess wrapping up here. Daniel, I want to ask. We've got a lot of like stuff going on at NAR and things that we'll just leave for another podcast about that. But specifically we've been talking about how, how to get this data worked out. Let me ask you a question about lockboxes. So I have this. People ask me to make life easier for them, right. They're out, out there selling property.

Matt Fowler [00:23:52]:
They're wherever they are between here and Wilmington, wherever they are. Right. They're interacting with, with a hive association. And if they're on the border around my area, I want to make it easier for the. And I think what I want to clarify that is I want to make it easier for the broker to say how access is managed. Right. You're talking about the broker. That's what I really want to do.

Matt Fowler [00:24:20]:
I don't have an opinion. I want to facilitate however the broker wants to manage access to that property. I want to encourage them to use electronic lockboxes because of security and analytics and other things. I'm not going to require that, but I'd like to talk about why that's better. How do you guys do that and how could we figure out how to make some of that easier for people?

Daniel Jones [00:24:45]:
Well, it can definitely be made easier, but right now the associations, just as we have a cooperative foundation to an MLS hive is about making the associations and MLs that are owners of hive cooperative with each other. So there are associations that worked out a way to, you know that we have super lock boxes, central boxes and master lock. And master lock. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The mandate is that these agents are able to show other homes within the MLS and the showing system that they use should enable that. And so as far as making it easier. Yeah, I'm 100%.

Matt Fowler [00:25:35]:
So I guess the associations kind of manage their own lockbox issues in.

Daniel Jones [00:25:39]:
That's right. That's right.

Matt Fowler [00:25:40]:
Okay, so this is going to have to be a one off where we'll just look at the ones right around us and figure out what we need to do with each of those accounts.

Daniel Jones [00:25:49]:
Well, we did a reciprocity agreement probably about three years ago.

Matt Fowler [00:25:54]:
Yeah, that did make it better. Yeah, that didn't make it better.

Daniel Jones [00:25:57]:
Yeah, but it could be better than that. But yeah. Yeah. So I, I'm, I'm happy to work with you and you know, I could put you in front of our partnership calls so you can have that conversation with the, with our owners as well. I'm happy to do that too.

Matt Fowler [00:26:13]:
Yeah, I'd love to do that, Daniel. I think the way I would want to, like what I want to do is talk to an actual human being who's having a problem, know deals with us in an overlap market and ask them what we could do for them.

Daniel Jones [00:26:26]:
Yeah, if I could hear, if I could hear that problem, I'd love to help in any, in any way as well. So.

Matt Fowler [00:26:33]:
Cool. Cool. Yeah, I know we, we want to do that. We just have to go get it done. But I'm glad that you and I can get together and talk about MLS stuff like this. I don't get to talk about mls. Most family doesn't really talk about. Want me to talk about.

Matt Fowler [00:26:50]:
You know, you probably get that too.

Daniel Jones [00:26:53]:
I hear you. Oh yeah, it's the same way. I'm like, let me tell you what happened today. And it's like, okay, I need to give you the backstory. Let me rewind.

Matt Fowler [00:27:00]:
Let me do. Yeah. And like a reference card for all the acronyms.

Daniel Jones [00:27:06]:
Yeah, that's right. That's right. Reshow and show.

Matt Fowler [00:27:09]:
Yeah, that's ridiculous. Well, do you know when you're. So we can put their feet to the fire when your timeline is for the ad listing AI thing?

Daniel Jones [00:27:20]:
I do not know. I just got an email from Werzer just moments before this and I have to read through it. And there was a conversation with Matrix literally today as well. So I got a piece through that because it takes two to tango. There's Aki Cell and then there's our MLS platforms and then there's us playing the music.

Matt Fowler [00:27:45]:
Yeah, yeah, I hear you. So you and I have talked about the mechanism and again we'll just. We're hiring some of the same vendors to try to get to the same place, which makes complete sense. We're both doing the same thing here. Well, we'll. When we get our rules audit back, I'd probably like to like to reconnect and yeah, I've been wanting to compare those. You know, like the. Like the Josh's Venn diagram from Riso that shows our.

Matt Fowler [00:28:16]:
It's like match.com for MLS as I've been describing it. It shows our. Our. Our relative compatibility in terms of the data and we could use some work. We looked pretty good with Canopy. Not very good with. Try with you guys or try on. So when the rules audit comes back, we should go through and look at those and see what we can do about that.

Matt Fowler [00:28:37]:
Just to be happy too make things better for the brokers and cleaner on their back end systems. My goal is to make sure that we have the best, cleanest, most up to date, most fastest data in North Carolina. And we're going to be using, as you just heard, the same infrastructure to do this. That's good for our users because this is like the Zenless systems. Two seconds or three seconds off of the primary system. So it is actually possible to make these systems as fast as the fastest app in the App Store. You really can do that on Spark. The same API that you guys are using.

Daniel Jones [00:29:12]:
Yeah, that would be. I'd love to see that. That would be awesome. I know it's. I know it's there. Yeah.

Matt Fowler [00:29:19]:
It's so funny. I got an email from Words or two. So we'll go read our emails and see what our schedule is going to be. Daniel, that's. All right. Thanks for getting together with me today. I really appreciate it.

Daniel Jones [00:29:31]:
All right. Thank you, Matt.

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