Doorify MLS Partners with Broker Public Portal

The real estate tech landscape is crowded with portals that sell leads and rank results by who pays the most. But there’s one project that’s doing things differently by giving control back to MLSs and brokers.

In this episode, I’m talking with Dan Troup, CEO of the Broker Public Portal (BPP), alongside our VP of Product Allan Nielsen. Dan shares why BPP was built, what makes it fundamentally different from other platforms, and how it’s helping local MLSs compete with the big players without compromising data or values. 

We also talk about Doorify’s plan to use BPP’s tech in everything from our public-facing search to multi-market broker tools. Allan explains how clean data and smart partnerships are already removing barriers that used to slow everything down. And we get into the future of AI, search intent, and why knowing what people are asking for might be even more valuable than the data itself.

The next generation of real estate search isn’t about gatekeeping, it’s about getting out of the way. Listen in to hear how this partnership is making that possible.

Specifically, this episode highlights the following themes: 

• How BPP’s governance model keeps it industry-first and community-driven
• What “search as a service” means for real estate product development
• Why standardized data is critical for fast, flexible innovation

Links from this episode:

• Get to know more about Dan Troup: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dantroup
• Learn more about Broker Public Portal: https://brokerpublicportal.com
• Explore Doorify MLS: https://doorifymls.com

1ae5b43598204883b524f061d4880e6d10fca88c (for podfollow.com)

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 3:02 HomeSnap, consolidation, and starting fresh
• 5:31 What makes BPP’s ownership and governance unique
• 7:00 Building tools developers can plug into in minutes
• 9:26 How search-as-a-service works for agents
• 14:18 The value of standardizing MLS data
• 20:32 Brokers Without Borders and multi-market access
• 21:54 Fair Display Guidelines explained
• 28:00 Why BPP can’t be bought
• 34:19 IDX Plus and using AI to measure engagement
• 38:21 Smart Filters and future fields driven by search behavior
• 41:10 What Doorify plans to do with BPP next

Transcript

Dan Troupe [00:00:00]:
When you start to look across price ranges and the people who are actually creating those searches and where they're at in the lifecycle, you're going to see a lot of similarities between them. This is the ultimate piece that has made search so social. You'll notice that you'll start getting stuff that you didn't ask for that doesn't fall within your criteria. And this concept of looking at the searches to better understand how other people search is something that is always missed in our space because we give away the entire data set. So this concept of looking at all of the searches and once you have enough searches, you can start to understand intent and you can understand customer profiles. And the similarity piece is really going to help socialize the search and get people to come back.

Matt Fowler [00:00:48]:
Hey, everybody, It's Matt Fowler, CEO of Doorify. MLS.com I'm here in Durham, North Carolina today for the next one of our Dwarf podcast with our vice president of mls, Alan Nielsen. Hello, Alan.

Allan Nielsen [00:01:04]:
Hello, Matt.

Matt Fowler [00:01:05]:
And we've got a special guest today, Dan Troup from the Broker Public Portal Project, BPP. Dan, you're joining us from Michigan today. Thanks for being here.

Dan Troupe [00:01:15]:
Thanks for having me. Excited to chat.

Matt Fowler [00:01:17]:
Yeah, it's fun. I'm glad we got to do this today. There was some news recently that our subscribers might have seen that Doorify has become an owner, an investor in the project. Before we get into what we intend to do with this thing, tell us where this came from. BPP has been around a while. I kind of joke when you and I talked about it that I think Alan and I have been around forever and we've written BPP off a few times, to be fair. Before you were there. Right.

Matt Fowler [00:01:45]:
It's been through some leadership changes and been through some differences. But tell us a little bit about where it is today.

Dan Troupe [00:01:52]:
Yeah. So my background is in the portal space. Worked for Remax for almost 20 years and got a phone call one day. It was like, hey, the BPP is looking for a CEO. And like you, I think I had written it off mentally. I was like, that thing's still alive. I had kind of written it off with the project Upstream because they kind of got started at the same time and they were both kind of, you know, tracking together. And I actually didn't even realize the success they had had with Home Snap, which was a successful piece of broker public portal.

Dan Troupe [00:02:21]:
I think they almost had a million agents on that platform under the broker public portals flag, per se, like getting everyone to sign up for a single portal. So my first reaction was, is that thing still alive? And you know, I wasn't super interested in it. And it's like, yeah, it's very much alive. And you know, they're rebooting it and you know, looking for someone to kind of be the first employee. They really didn't have employees either. It was more of a joint venture with the Home Snap folks and then costar bought them. But I like to rewind the clock back to the 2015, which is the kind of the nexus of Broker Polo Portal, which is what happened in that time period. And in that time period we saw Zillow surpass realtor.com as the top portal.

Dan Troupe [00:03:02]:
And I think MLSS had gotten together and said, and brokers and said, we need to do something about this. We need to take more ownership in this portal space. So that's kind of the nexus of that. You know, fast forward 10 years later, having a successful Home Snap launch and then h having Home Snap go away. People still talk about it today, wanting us to replicate some of the pieces it did. And some people have filled the gaps there. Right. We've had great products like Zen List and others that have come in and said, look, people are earning for, for something here, a client collab tool.

Dan Troupe [00:03:32]:
You know, is this something that we can fill this gap with Home Snap going away? And some have done a really good job of that. So, you know, I started in January of 23, built a team here at Broker Public Portal and have had, you know, great success and progress in what we're building and holding true to the portal name. We will be launching a portal for consumers to use and for MLS's to use. And so, yeah, excited about the future of Broker Public Portal.

Matt Fowler [00:03:58]:
I want to ask you just a couple more questions about BPP, Dan. When I put the list of current owners in front of my board, their first reaction was, gosh, we need to be on that list. Yeah, how many are there? There's a lot of people on that list.

Dan Troupe [00:04:14]:
I think there's. Don't quote me exactly on this. Somewhere 48 or so MLS and 46 or 47 brokerages. Brokerages have consolidated, so have MLSs have consolidated. What's great about this is if you're an MLS or a broker, our governance only allows those two entities to join the Broker Public Portal. You can only own one share. So as we've seen consolidation, you know, whether Compass, which is an owner of ours, a shareholder of ours, has bought another brokerage that has a unit, we have to return one of those units. You can only own one unit in the broker portal, doesn't allow anybody to gain more power or ownership structure.

Dan Troupe [00:04:48]:
In fact, the investment is very small. But it's almost a statement saying we want to be a part of this. And a lot of those came in the early 2015 era.

Matt Fowler [00:04:57]:
Yeah, that's how we looked at it for sure. So we were the first one to become a new owner in a little while.

Dan Troupe [00:05:05]:
Thank you for stumbling through that with me as I try to figure out the process.

Matt Fowler [00:05:09]:
No, I didn't. I didn't realize it until we were done, Dan. I mean, we're proud to do that. I hope there's more because I think this is clearly an opportunity to have this. As Alan was just. We were just describing a little while ago, it's a sharp new tool in our toolbox. We kind of approach the market, prop tech market a little bit differently than most mlss. Alan and I don't want to be the gatekeepers here.

Matt Fowler [00:05:31]:
We want to facilitate innovation where we find it and see if something catches with the brokers. And we think that this has got a number of opportunities for us to use the API, the search as a service, which we'll get into and talk about that. Alan, maybe that's a good time to tell us a little bit about what your product vision for BPP. It's like property search, how it fits into the picture.

Allan Nielsen [00:05:56]:
So in the last year and a half, two years, we have done a lot of investment in standardizing our listing data and what else we can do to make things easier and really foster the innovation that you talked about before, Paola. And I think what Dan is bringing to the table of Roku Public Portal is along those lines as well. There are so many things in life that are complicated that are blockers for innovation. By bringing in broker public portal here, we extend this. You know, I used to say we want to be easy to work with.

Dan Troupe [00:06:26]:
Right.

Allan Nielsen [00:06:26]:
That can sometimes be difficult. But what the technology that Dan is bringing to the table here is something that both vendors, our brokers, can really use and get up to speed very, very quickly. The concept of search as a service is. You know, we all heard of software as a service. Search as a service is kind of a.

Dan Troupe [00:06:45]:
Kind of a. I can't use it. Come up with something better, let me know.

Allan Nielsen [00:06:52]:
But it really brings a new light to that aspect of it. And I know we're probably going to start talking about AI a little bit later in this as well.

Dan Troupe [00:06:59]:
Right.

Allan Nielsen [00:07:00]:
But we are really looking at how searches are being done and we Are looking at it from a different angle now. And I think Dan is definitely in the forefront in how this can be achieved. So very excited about bringing this or being part of this going forward for sure.

Dan Troupe [00:07:16]:
When I take broker public portal out of it, just rewind the clock a little bit. Building applications in our space has always involved replicating MLS data. MLS have been weary about that. What are you going to do with my data? Right. Take a full copy of it. You know, we had web API which was supposed to be hopefully not, you know, everybody would need to replicate. But there's so many things that come into play when you think of search as a service, right. That you have to replicate because you have to get other things involved.

Dan Troupe [00:07:43]:
You have to build your own autocomplete, you have to run your own stats, you have to run your own save search, right? And if we could build a much more rounded out actual service that comes with SLAs and spans many markets and does the heavy lifting, what will that guy in his garage or that kid in his garage or that, that woman who has always had a great idea about real estate and transaction ask AI to build it for it, right. And get access to real estate data quickly. And we think the time is right for this to be kind of a third phase. What I call the third phase. Let's put RETS in the first phase, web web API in the second phase. But now this third phase of real time access to listing data still under MLS control. I'm not deciding who gets access to these things, but it's definitely a trend in which I see continuing to allow people to bring products to the market quicker. And as we know, more products come to your marketplace.

Dan Troupe [00:08:40]:
Do we need more products? Some would say no. Maybe someone say yes. I think drives competition, right. And drives prices down and drives innovation. And that's what we're trying to do.

Matt Fowler [00:08:48]:
Let me see if I can describe this in a. I don't know, I'm imagining our subscribers sitting there. Alan and Dan and I spend a lot of time inside baseball talking about prop tech and we use all these acronyms. Search as a service is different than replication in a, you know, an enormous way. But let me describe that. If you have a website and it's got, you know, Allen sells carry.com and it's got, you know, picture of Alan and his cat and a list of Alan's features, featured listings and a way for you to sign up for updates that happen in the marketplace. Standard like IDX website kind of thing. In the past, you'd have to build one of those.

Matt Fowler [00:09:26]:
You have to hire a company that's been given a license to all of our data. Two million plus records with the history and all that stuff. And you'd have to pay them to engineer the separate tool for you that's going to hit their database, which is then constantly updated at some expense so that it's. It stays live and the ability to hit that update the price change that makes that house available to your buyer or a new house that your buyer hasn't seen. Currently, the fastest app in the App Store is doing that in seconds. And we all want to compete with that and we all want our websites, alansellscarry.com to be first in that race. And what Dan is doing is he's saying, look, let's skip all of that back and forth with the data copying and let's just use this. Let's just deliver the search to that website as a service without copying or replicating the data.

Matt Fowler [00:10:19]:
You're just referring to the data back where it lives at home in our system so that we can be super fast and talk about speed. Dan. So it can be like, styled to look however you want. The way this is delivered is agnostic. That's an enormous difference. Back in the day, I had a company called Solid Earth that I sold to fbs and we wrote this tool called Spring, and you could put in an agent's license number and generate a website for them in about a minute because it was all built into the APIs. That's what Dan's talking about, about getting a product to the market faster. If the marginal cost to create one for a broker to try out is essentially zero, because you just spawn them from the license number, then it's pretty easy to lower the barrier to experimentation and innovation in that way.

Matt Fowler [00:11:12]:
So maybe expand on how you. How you see BPP working in that way. Dan, did I explain?

Dan Troupe [00:11:17]:
Yeah, it's tough to sell an API. It's tough to talk about an API.

Matt Fowler [00:11:22]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dan Troupe [00:11:23]:
I'm currently reading the Optimist, which is Sam Altman's new book. Right. Which I recommend you listen or read because it's the Nexus. It's like the. When ChatGPT wasn't born, GPT was born, right? And it was an API and they tried to sell this as an API. Like, imagine what you can do with this. And then they just decided, like, we got to put this interface on top of this so people can understand what it does. I'll just make it a chat interface.

Dan Troupe [00:11:49]:
It was Kind of like a last ditch effort of like people know how to chat, they know how to text. Right. Maybe they'll chat with this thing and see how it goes. And now that's the product, Right?

Matt Fowler [00:11:59]:
Right.

Dan Troupe [00:11:59]:
And so we've had to take our search as a service and we've had to put a search on top of it. You're welcome to go check it out@brokerdata.com and you can search the Charlotte Marketplace and you can search. I don't think I have your guys's data on there. You guys are still in a private entity, but Indianapolis and Chicago are on there as well. And we had to build an interface to show you what the search as.

Matt Fowler [00:12:19]:
A service could do.

Dan Troupe [00:12:20]:
Right. And so we've created this bhag. If you don't know what a bhag is, it's big, hairy, audacious goal, right. Like you look at SpaceX, they want to make, you know, our species multi planetary. They want to go to Mars. Right. Like that's like way, way out there. Right.

Dan Troupe [00:12:34]:
So ours is we want to help brokers and MLS implement technology in minutes, not months. Now, I could have said hours and days in there, but I don't think it's audacious enough. We want you to be walking the floor at the NAR conference or your local state conference or your door. I don't even know if you have a conference at Doorify or your brokerages conference. Right. Meet someone who is creating a great application and they say, what MLS are you with? They say Doorify. Hey, you want to test it right now? We'll give you a 30 day test. It'll be live.

Dan Troupe [00:13:07]:
Just give us your credentials and it'll be live. Like that's how we think you should be implementing technology. Not.

Matt Fowler [00:13:13]:
Yeah, for sure.

Dan Troupe [00:13:13]:
Okay, what MLS are you in? Oh, you're in dorfi. We need to go get a license agreement signed a copy of it. Like, we envision a world like that in the future where you can try things quickly and get to market quickly in those minutes. Right.

Matt Fowler [00:13:26]:
Well, what is it? It takes less than two minutes to join Doorify now because we digitally transformed that workflow.

Dan Troupe [00:13:33]:
Great.

Matt Fowler [00:13:34]:
And that's what we're talking about here. Like if you want to try it, as long as the application is directly connected to the right API, which is an application programming interface for our subscribers. It's just a way that software talks to software so you don't have to re key things. So, you know, one application can load with the data that you expect it to have when it comes up for you. And Alan spent an enormous amount of time 18 months ago. You referred to standardization earlier, Alan, to get us to a place where we could use industry tools like BPP. This was not possible prior to our data translation work. You know, it takes 60x more time to work with an MLS.

Matt Fowler [00:14:18]:
Maybe you could talk to us about that, Dan, to help us help our subscribers appreciate a bit more why we had to change adult living community or townhouse definition or where crawl space goes. All of those things had to be translated. We translated over a hundred fields just in residential. So the impact of that was pretty intense.

Allan Nielsen [00:14:39]:
Yeah. And that's what I just wanted to add a note to. Because after we went through that entire process and it was a tough process to go through, the two following implementations we did after that was CMA Snap and it was senlist. We barely had any conversations about the data. The data was a non issue and that was the first time we had that experience. And quite honestly that was weird. It was like, did we miss something? But it was so smooth. Right.

Allan Nielsen [00:15:07]:
So it was a huge investment. But we're definitely seeing the benefits from that now.

Dan Troupe [00:15:11]:
I came my prior employment, you know, we were mapping 420 up to 450 feeds. Right. Some in data dictionary format. The work you guys do and you know, I think you provide your data through multiple platforms I think is important. Right. Bridge Spark, there's grid out there, there's trestle out there. Right. These platforms help with the normalization.

Dan Troupe [00:15:31]:
But I think if the MLS itself does a normalization and does it to the RIZO Data Dictionary standards, it makes life easier. As you go throughout the state of North Carolina, as you go throughout the us as you go to other countries, it's really helpful as we're starting to see this adoption. And I sit on the board of directors at riso and I'm pushing the limits too with Data Dictionary. We all kind of are. I will tell you 100% from 2018, when I started ramping up doing about 400 MLS feeds to now the amount of Data Dictionary we have that we didn't have before our implementation, our time to market is way quicker. The grids and trestles didn't even exist at this time, you know, back in 2018. So us starting in 2023, we have not run into a feed yet that isn't Data Dictionary. Now we've only processed about 15 data feeds.

Dan Troupe [00:16:24]:
So we're not really getting out there quite yet. But we know we're going to run into them. We're prepared to map them to it. But what's interesting is we have all this great details around what's been mapped already. So we know hey, lanai means patio and people are starting to share their mappings of this actually means this in the data dictionary.

Allan Nielsen [00:16:45]:
Right.

Dan Troupe [00:16:45]:
And so applying that and people are starting to share that, applying that across our mappings and filling in some of the gaps across the mappings has really improved the data quality. Really forgetting something.

Matt Fowler [00:16:59]:
Well, right. And we've got. We were talking about AI a minute ago. Before we get into how we're going to use AI to improve our data quality, I want to just touch on. You were just talking about the brokers. What do we intend to do with BPP? We've got a different plan for different parts of this. There is the search as a service product. There's the.

Matt Fowler [00:17:20]:
Which we intend to incorporate into Doorifymls.com as the property search experience. There's data that could be on that search result for our consumer experience that could be outside of Doorify. We're working on data partnerships with our friends at Hive, with our friends at Canopy. Like these things take forever. So we don't have anything any news to make on the podcast today, but I've been talking about like being 99% done with Canopy for a year and we are. I hope Steve's watching and he's working on our contract right now, but I.

Dan Troupe [00:17:55]:
Don'T think we have Steve. You want me to text everybody else right now?

Matt Fowler [00:17:58]:
Everybody text me Steve Bird.

Dan Troupe [00:18:00]:
He's gonna hate us.

Matt Fowler [00:18:02]:
We don't really think there's any material disagreement on the license. He's just getting it done. And the idea is that if you are, this is not about an agent just quickly working in Raleigh today, having Doorify empowering them to go list in Charlotte is not what we're talking about. It's probably a violation of ethics. Not mine, the realtors. But if you have an office in Charlotte and you have an office in Raleigh and you have an office in Asheville and you're, you're currently in different data formats, you're having to normalize those back into something to pull it over to your website at a great expense, usually from an out of state or even out of country data grade data reprocessor who are selling you MLS data because your MLS don't provide it to the brokers in a way that works for them and across, across these markets. BPP is a tool that we intend to use to provide A product to those companies. I could list them.

Matt Fowler [00:19:02]:
There's a dozen who have operations in all these cities and we can give them a Risso 2.0 standard, super fast data, a compilation that will make them more competitive in the marketplace by using our.

Dan Troupe [00:19:16]:
We're not very good at naming things here at Broker Public Portal, we like to just steal. Look at search as a service. Like, come on, like, right. I mean, SaaS existed out there. Let's just steal what else is out there. Yeah, right. So we, we like to say Brokers Without Borders.

Matt Fowler [00:19:31]:
Okay.

Dan Troupe [00:19:32]:
So, you know, all right, if I'm licensed in the state of North Carolina and I have the Redfin app or I have the Zillow app on my phone, both fantastic apps, by the way. Cheers. Kudos to those teams for creating great experiences that we want to chase after. We want to go after those great experiences and we're learning from things that they do and what not to do and what to do. But it might have been one of your brokers, Matt, in a conversation we had early on, or one of your agents who was just like, I just want to move the map and the properties keep appearing.

Matt Fowler [00:20:00]:
Yeah. No edges.

Dan Troupe [00:20:03]:
No, just, you know, this is our Brokers Without Borders piece right where we are. If we're all part of this MLS community, we're all committing to this MLS community. We're not asking you to complicated data shares. We're just asking your ability to search it as much as consumers can search. And so can we provide this cross borders, no matter what mls, their system, they're in ability to move that map and still have property show up and maybe give a little bit more information than the consumer can see. Right. Maybe showing instructions or some other things. Right.

Dan Troupe [00:20:32]:
And we're taking this slow. We're not going in quick saying, hey, you know, these are the things that come along with it are data share agreements. Everyone's providing the data to me and I'm allowing people to search it. Nobody's getting full copies of these datas. We're not having to implement them into other pieces.

Matt Fowler [00:20:45]:
Right.

Dan Troupe [00:20:45]:
But we want to make the consumer and the agent first. We want to get them on a level playing field and that they have the same access to the same tools and the agent has access to even more tools and they feel like the agent is passing down to the consumer access to tools that are on par with these national level portals that are out there. And it starts with search as a service. Obviously, us getting that far. You have to be able to search that data very quickly. And I think North Carolina is great because we have other partners already in North Carolina. This is a great starting ground for us to really see if we can knock down some of those borders or those walls.

Matt Fowler [00:21:19]:
Yeah, I really see that as a near term opportunity. Dan, we were just talking about Canopy. This is about making things easier for our participants and I think we can do that pretty quickly with this new tool.

Allan Nielsen [00:21:31]:
I do have a about that then. So we were talking about consumers also having access to these apps and without borders and stuff like that and some of the conversations or questions that we got when we launched our public facing search. What happens with the leads? And I went through your website and you do have a section about Fair Display guidelines. So maybe since it's something we're doing already. What does that mean?

Dan Troupe [00:21:54]:
Yeah, shout out to the realty alliance for coming up with fair display.org if you want to go there and check it out. It's the guidelines in which we're governed by. So when Doorify says, hey, we want to be a unit holder, we cannot produce products that don't follow Fair Display guidelines and we can't support products that don't follow the Fair Display guidelines. Now if a broker, it's not in broker's best interest to follow Fair Display guidelines on their own products. That's where IDX comes into play. So we're different than idx, but really the lead should go back to the content creator, whether it's the broker and the agent that gave us that content. We can't sell advertising. That's another big piece unless it's agreed upon because it may compete with a broker's specific businesses.

Dan Troupe [00:22:36]:
So we can't like advertise mortgage or title or any of those, any of those pieces. We can't force rank results based upon who pays us the most. So there's no showcase capabilities here. So everyone complains about different portals with different business models. I'm not here to argue those business models. We've just chosen a business model that's sponsored by the industry where we can't sell leads, we can't do referral fees, we can't do sponsored advertising, we can't do sponsored ranking. There's no premium upsell model to here to this project. We only really sell to the MLS itself.

Dan Troupe [00:23:09]:
And so powering MLS websites, empowering national portals that give reference back to those creators that gave us the content.

Allan Nielsen [00:23:16]:
Another question. So considering this being open source and can and we have now invested in broker public portal, can somebody come in and buy this app from us? Or what does that look like?

Dan Troupe [00:23:28]:
Great question, Alan. So this is actually one of the things that got me excited about Broker Public Portal. Historically. I've been searching for search as a service in our space for 10, 15 years. You know, coming fresh out of college and starting in this space, seeing the technology that was being used, I was like always had my jaw open. Like, wait, there's no API for real estate data in the US and trying to solve it at different levels. At the brokerage level, I was never able to solve it. In fact, one of the first ones that I saw I was super pumped about was Retsley, which got purchased by Zillow.

Dan Troupe [00:24:02]:
Right. It's now called Bridge and you guys participate in it and met the team there. And then I think three calls into my conversation with them, it was like, oh, say hello to Arrow, they're buying us, you know, kind of thing. I was like, oh man. Like, you know, but I was excited about it. I thought we could even get more expansion. Right. So that kind of no one's in position.

Matt Fowler [00:24:23]:
Bridge had, Bridge had the common input form project that was, you know, RLE.

Dan Troupe [00:24:29]:
Came first and then they bought Bridge Interactive.

Matt Fowler [00:24:31]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dan Troupe [00:24:32]:
That was kind of after they kind of merged those two together.

Matt Fowler [00:24:35]:
Right?

Dan Troupe [00:24:36]:
Yeah. I love the name Retsley. I mean, kind of, kind of told you exactly what I was doing is trying to rest interface on top of.

Matt Fowler [00:24:42]:
Rats, I guess it was. Right. And one of our brokers picked it up and now we can't really effectively use it at the enterprise level. Yeah, we talk about the MLS as being Switzerland all the time. Like we can't get involved in these conflicts if we're going to maintain our independence, our position as the hub, the trusted place to put your expiration dates, your contact list, your office notes. These are things that we've been keeping confidential for brokers for two decades now. And we know how to do that. But these tools get bought out from under us and that's one of the reasons that I was attracted to BPP.

Matt Fowler [00:25:16]:
Dan, you just said it's one of the reasons you were. Alan, when we heard you were there, we were interested when we heard how the go to market strategy was going to involve the ownership structure. You just described the open source nature of the product for the subscribers. Not in the technology business. That really means it's sort of like a Bluetooth thing. It's a standard that can't be bought. No one owns it, so you can't buy it. It can't get picked up by Samsung or something.

Matt Fowler [00:25:44]:
And Made proprietary because it isn't for sale. So you can't buy something. You can add to it, you can contribute to it, you can be a part of it. In the kind of classic broker cooperative environment that we work in Switzerland, again, it fits with us from a governance perspective. It's a new. I think it's a bridge to the future for us technologically because over time we of course want to dial back the replication. We'd like to have all questions answered from one of our APIs so that we know what the question was.

Dan Troupe [00:26:16]:
The question is more important than the answer sometimes.

Matt Fowler [00:26:18]:
Well, so we're starting to really, maybe we'll get into AI and be done. So we're starting to really think about consumer preference. And at the MLS level, that's not cultural, that's not something that we think about. The MLS even have an argument about who their customer is. Like the subscriber certainly is the payer, right? That's the person who pays the bills, the broker, the subscriber, the appraiser. I'll leave those guys out. But we see ourselves as a B2B2C company. So yes, we are paid by the B in the middle, but the satisfaction of the consumer at the end and what they're doing on our networks is hypercritical.

Matt Fowler [00:26:58]:
If we're able to iterate our product delivery or change the way we do things, what we ask you about a listing, what we put in the media, what data element we're able to find about fiber availability or green features, those are things that we know that because we started looking that buyers are asking questions about. The brokers don't always have that on the input form. So our role is to start looking at those user preferences from these questions that they ask us, figuring out what they want to know about these houses, land or investments so that we can get it into the compilation, meet that consumer demand. And I think we've never even thought about that before in the MLS space and everything like it is just gold, gold, gold to know the patterns of consumer preferences, how they move. That includes the B in the middle. We're watching for their preferences as well. What products are they adopting? What practices do the agents have that correlate to high market performance? How can we tell them more about this that you know, it looks like everybody who took our new member class last year in person is in the top 20%. How did that happen? Maybe that's true or not, but unless we mine our data for these correlations that we can make, we're not learning in a way that we can in the future.

Matt Fowler [00:28:19]:
And if it's not on our platform, we just don't know about it.

Dan Troupe [00:28:22]:
Yeah, I just want to go back real quick on the governance side and make sure everyone's clear on this. The BPP can't be bought, everyone owns one share. So that puts us in a position where no one can gang up and say, hey, we want to sell this. The mistake that was made on the home snap side is a lot of the power went into home snapshot basically house because they had the technologies and tools that we were operating. In this instance, we started from scratch. Everything we're talking about today, there's zero leverage. Nobody can hold leverage on me. It was built in house by us, by a team of experts, including myself and some people that have been in the portal search space for a long time in API space.

Dan Troupe [00:29:01]:
All of our vendor contracts have the potential for multi source. There's no single source, so even a vendor couldn't hold us in a situation where we'd have to cancel. We are picking some of the best vendors out there. And so I just want to be clear on that. This isn't going to end up in a home snap type scenario before where the technology just one day potentially disappears.

Matt Fowler [00:29:21]:
Yeah, we were super attracted to that because Alan and I spend. Well, Alan spends a decent portion of his year putting systems into place that got bought by somebody and we have to, you know, go swap out something else.

Dan Troupe [00:29:33]:
I do want to make a slight warning here. It can go away. Like this does require effort, right. This does require people, it does require money for us to realize this vision. And so getting backing by Doorify and getting backing by Canopy and by Mrad and you know, all the MLS's in the country are going to be important for us. Otherwise the other business models have to go, right? We have to then charge for leads or put up advertising, you know, at the expense of brokers. Right. Brokers buying their own clients back.

Dan Troupe [00:30:03]:
So if we're not willing to pitch in on a portal or we're not as an industry not willing to pay for these things, then the other business models will exist that we complain about for sure. I assure you it can't be bought or sold. But I do want to kind of scare you that it can go away. But what will always be there is this underlying asset that I'm sure Alen is smart enough he could pick up what we've taken and run with it as well. You talked about community, open source. We like to say community source because it's only available to the broker public, portal community. But at the end of the day we're building something that's super valuable, that's an asset that an MLS could get a copy of. If something were to happen, we obviously don't want that to happen.

Dan Troupe [00:30:38]:
We want to continue to execute at the rate we are. Right.

Matt Fowler [00:30:40]:
Well from our perspective Dan, you know, the world's spinning really fast and we can't see very far out into the future at the MLS level. But this is an investment that I can tell my board with great confidence that we can make confidently because of the governance structure, because of the durability that you've built into it, and it works. And the community source is something that we're really eager to engage with. We've got some full stack developers on our staff that are very talented. We have our own API infrastructure, our own internal IT projects that could definitely use another great API. We're super thrilled on all kinds of levels to get to work with the team and with the community. We hope to be an important part of it going forward.

Dan Troupe [00:31:26]:
Yeah, no, I appreciate that. I just want to make sure we got that in and we can continue on on the AI side of things or are the questions more important than the answers? I'm wondering, I'm curious if from your guys standpoint, have you ever looked at your save searches across your mls, right, Just how the save searches are and I ask people all the time, hey, can you dump your save searches for me so I can look at what the most popular fields are? Because that tells us what agents are selecting and how consumers are searching. It shouldn't shock you what the top fields are. We can go over what those fields are. We are, you know, bed, bath, square footage and price are going to be up there for sure. But what's curious is when you start to look across price ranges and the people who are actually creating those searches and where they're at in the life cycle, you're going to see a lot of similarities between them. And this is the ultimate piece that has made search so social. And if you've ever signed up for a safe search at Zillow or Redfin or Realtor, you'll notice that you'll start getting stuff that you didn't ask for that doesn't fall within your criteria.

Dan Troupe [00:32:25]:
And this concept of looking at the searches to better understand how other people search is something that is always missed in our space. Because we give away the entire data set, we don't know what people are doing with it. We don't know what kind of searches they're doing, Right?

Matt Fowler [00:32:37]:
That's right.

Dan Troupe [00:32:38]:
So the best example I can give you to this is your grocery store. You know, Alan and I both like strawberries and bananas. And we both go to the grocery store, right? And we scan that little card they give us or we, you know, to get the coupons, right? And this is a plot, not a ploy, but this is. They want to understand who I am. They want to understand who Alan is. But Alan goes and he buys strawberries, bananas and blueberries, right? And they look at their customer profiles and Dan buys strawberries and bananas. You know what, maybe we should send them a coupon for blueberries. So this concept of looking at all of the searches and once you have enough searches, you can start to understand intent and you can understand customer profiles.

Dan Troupe [00:33:18]:
And the similarity piece is what is really going to help socialize the search and get people to come back. They're processing tons of searches every day. But our transactions are low, Right. Four or five million more transactions aren't necessarily happening, but we should embrace the socialization aspect of looking at houses. Are you cheating on your current house? Maybe. Who cares? You don't. Your current house doesn't need to know, right? That it's an SNL skit. Let's be honest, right?

Matt Fowler [00:33:43]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dan Troupe [00:33:44]:
It's late at night, I go onto my bed, I open up my laptop and what, search for homes.

Matt Fowler [00:33:49]:
One of my favorite. One of my favorites ever. I mean, when you, you know, you've reached a certain cultural milestone when the SNL's poking fun at you. But you know that P stand is a critical one. And we have a new data product that we're talking about powering with BPP. And for the subscribers out there listening to us today, as we get to the end of our time, you've been want to think about a concept we Allan and I refer to as IDX plus. And it's. It's a.

Matt Fowler [00:34:19]:
It's new. Okay. So you get your IDX feed to make your brokerage website go, and it's got a list of the houses for sale and everything like normal. But all of the consumer metrics that Dan was just talking about are now being accumulated by Doorify in our data project, hopefully to be available as a field in the BPP feed. That would be a compilation of how each listing is doing in terms of engagement competition. Does this listing have a 10 out of 10 engagement score or is this a 1 out of 10 engagement score?

Dan Troupe [00:34:59]:
Oh, interesting.

Matt Fowler [00:35:00]:
Yep. So what we can do going up.

Allan Nielsen [00:35:03]:
Or a number of showings going down.

Matt Fowler [00:35:05]:
And what is it about the ones that have a 10? Okay, so all the tens have a floor plan or all the tens have an open house scheduled or have virtual prices. Have a correct price perhaps. And we can talk about that like when we. What is it? Those are about correlations you can see in the data. When you have those preferences and you have the property data. The property data has attributes. We're using AI to mention AI to analyze these things, but also to fill out the input forms starting this summer. It's super fancy autofill.

Matt Fowler [00:35:41]:
So you tell us the address using AI image recognition in the photos, polling 60 plus authoritative databases across the country to find everything that's ever been written about that property. We determine which are the best, most accurate fields and we fill out 70% more fields than normal, four times faster using AI. And that means we're going to get more complete, more accurate data, whether it's being copied over by a computer, not typed in by a human on a keyboard. Going to be able to tell you if more complete listings are getting a higher engagement score. I expect they will. But the ability to subscribe to this data and along with your IDX data and put it back into your own learning data set as a broker is something that you get as a subscriber and a member of Glorify. In addition to the property data, you're also getting some, some data that may be even more valuable than the property list itself.

Dan Troupe [00:36:41]:
Yeah, I'm excited to see what that data looks like. That's, it's going to be cool. And I'm excited to see how my data, how consumers interact with those listings can go back into that. Right. Like and provide more, kind of create that flywheel effect on it.

Matt Fowler [00:36:54]:
That's one of the endpoints that we're going to be talking about. You know, like we have an endpoint at Zillow, we have an endpoint at our own brand where Zillow will tell you through their API what their hit count was today, their traffic. Yeah. And what their click through percentage was. It comes up in search. But how often does somebody click through to the listing detail page and that percentage is available? So we bring all of that stuff in, we run it through our own algorithm and we come up with this overall score to say how it's doing. We have another score called the listing completeness score that's going to tell us if you filled out the whole thing. And we have some plans for people that do more there than others, you get rewarded.

Allan Nielsen [00:37:35]:
You know, we all, whether it's the brokers, us as the MLS or vendors, we all have assumptions about what, what makes a difference on listings, but nobody. Well, some may have some data, but that's where we want to get to. We don't want to guess on this, right. We don't want to make assumptions. We can get the data and say, this is how it actually works out there. That would be a huge benefit for everybody.

Dan Troupe [00:37:59]:
One of the new things we're capturing, if you go to brokerdata.com and do a search like in the Charlotte Asheville Marketplace, that you'll see this red button says smart filter. Right? And you can ask it anything. Right? You can ask for something. I'll just be clear. It's very still very objective. Like it has to be kind of MLS things that you're asking for. It isn't like subjective things that you could ask for of good neighborhood or something like that. Right.

Dan Troupe [00:38:21]:
It has to be about the property itself. We're really interested in aggregating that data up, giving it back to those areas to say, wait a minute, a lot of people are asking for lake frontage, right? Feet. Like, I need 100 foot of lake frontage. But it's not an MLS field. Maybe we should start making it an MLS field. Right? So this open context box of what people ask for think, we think it's going to generate some data that says, oh, in this area, maybe you guys should add something that tells consumers this information or, you know, everyone's looking for a water view or a mountain view or access to this specific trail. Those kind of things as we aggregate them together and give them back to the industry and give them back to the community. We're eager to see how it shapes the data dictionary, how consumers search that data.

Dan Troupe [00:39:07]:
Right. But if we just had the forms where you hit the buttons, you wouldn't be able to capture that. Right. And so in this instance, we're, we're curious to see how, like you said, the questions matter just as much as the answers. To get to that, I think what.

Matt Fowler [00:39:19]:
Makes this a little bit different, I mean, I know Totality is working on AI projects for their user interface. ICE Mortgage Technology is fbss. Zenless is Sidekick. All of our partners are doing this. Those are all commercial vendor companies that could get bought, shut down, go public, whatever. This happens, a good deal, and the contracts with those companies change. We saw that happen with a Moody's acquisition if few years ago. We just changed the landscape entirely.

Matt Fowler [00:39:48]:
And this is a. A different project that we're. We're undertaking here with BPP. It's one of the reasons we're really excited about it and we get to work with Dan. It's super fun.

Dan Troupe [00:40:00]:
Yeah. I want to be clear. Those companies. Those companies will be bought.

Matt Fowler [00:40:03]:
Yeah. Yeah. For sure.

Dan Troupe [00:40:04]:
They start them with the intention of. Of flipping them. Right. That they. Their exits. Right.

Matt Fowler [00:40:09]:
I sold mine. I mean, it took me 19 years, but he sold mine.

Dan Troupe [00:40:12]:
That's the exit strategy. Build something.

Matt Fowler [00:40:15]:
I'm not criticizing them. I work with. I'm. Every one I mentioned is available on our platform and I don't see any real end to that. As long as there's Demand among our 14,000 users, then you're going to be able to buy a copy of Paragon or Matrix or Flex or whatever else works with the standards, follows our rules, is legal in North Carolina. You're probably going to be able to plug it in the door.

Dan Troupe [00:40:39]:
Yeah.

Allan Nielsen [00:40:40]:
But that's also why we offer choice.

Dan Troupe [00:40:42]:
Right.

Allan Nielsen [00:40:42]:
If an acquisition happens and some brokers feel so uncomfortable about it, that's what choice is about.

Matt Fowler [00:40:47]:
Yeah. There's an option right next to that one on the dashboard and you can swap today. I don't know where BPP is going to ultimately kind of first surface in the lives of our subscribers. We'll talk about that. Alan's really in charge of product. We have a lot of plans. We mentioned Doorifyfimalist.com already, but they're also data products. A new potential statewide data product.

Matt Fowler [00:41:10]:
Those things will just be coming soon in the news, so watch for those. We've just gotten signed up a couple of weeks ago. We'll have to figure out when the schedule is going to first hit the subscribers here in our area. Hopefully it'll be with that data share.

Dan Troupe [00:41:24]:
I'm excited to see how you guys use our search as a service. We're not sure what people are going to build on it. We call it a crane that builds other cranes. We are excited to see what people are going to do with it. And we've given our vision of what we've been able to do with our search as a service. But we're super excited about the vision of what other people are going to do with that search as a service.

Allan Nielsen [00:41:45]:
Which also means our subscribers may not know that something is powered by a broker public portal.

Dan Troupe [00:41:51]:
They would never know.

Allan Nielsen [00:41:52]:
Read the benefits from it. Right?

Dan Troupe [00:41:54]:
Exactly. They would scroll the map and the listings would still show. And that's how you know it's being powered by that. Right.

Matt Fowler [00:42:01]:
Yeah, that's one of our first objectives, really, is to do that on our own website and then, of course, be able to provide that kind of seamless or edgeless feed to participants that have memberships and other MLs in the state.

Dan Troupe [00:42:13]:
Yeah.

Matt Fowler [00:42:13]:
Dan, thanks for joining us today. Allan, thanks for leaning in as always. And we will see you guys on the next edition of the Door podcast. And we'll put the. Dan mentioned the website earlier. We'll put those in the show notes.

Dan Troupe [00:42:26]:
Thanks, guys.

Matt Fowler [00:42:26]:
Thanks again, everybody. Have a good one.

Dan Troupe [00:42:28]:
Yeah. Thank you.