April 22, 2004

Spoke to Brian Davenport, chief information officer for Stewart Mortgage Information after he exited the links. What a day for golf! Attendees of the joint REIPA/NPPRA had their golf outing yesterday and Davenport gave the course high marks. I had to take his word for it as work on the next issue of RETI kept me back at the hotel. He's one a number of familiar faces I've seen here at the conference in Williamsburg.

We chatted a bit about the first show on this year's eRadio technology series. Davenport was a panelist for eRadio—Getting Connect for Bundled Services, which aired back in February. Transcripts and CDs from that show are still available. Stewart was a major sponsor of that event and Davenport says the company considered it quite a success. I was happy to hear him say that as I thought the show was great.

Stewart is also sponsoring next week's show, eRadio—AVM Nation. There's not much time left to get registered, if you haven't already. You can find the details on the RETI website.

Also visited with Jim Kirchmeyer. He will be a panelist on the upcoming eRadio show. Kirchmeyer owns two companies, an appraisal management firm (he is an appraiser), Kirchmeyer & Associates, and an AVM development firm, Real-Info Inc. He's also finishing work on a new book about AVMs, but he wants to put the finishing touches on it before we talk much about it. He expects to have it ready within a week or so.

Friday is the first long day of conference sessions here and I'm really looking forward to it. I'll post details later this evening. The conference runs through tomorrow, so by the time you get back to your offices on Monday, I should have a lot of good information from the show up on the site.

Have a great weekend.

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April 21, 2004

The joint REIPA/NPPRA conference got off to a good start. About a dozen professionals from the Real Estate Information Professionals Association headed up to Capitol Hill to meet with legislators, primarily about privacy issues related to public records. Among them were Rob Walker from First American and Darity Wesley of Privacy Solutions. Both visited the offices of California legislators, but actually visited with aides. Wesley delivered a position paper. I’m working to get a copy and permission to post it. I’ll let you know.

I had the pleasure of visiting with Walker at the opening reception. He was a bit concerned about some of the comments he made for the upcoming October Research Corporation eRadio—AVM Nation teleseminar that will air next week. Walker is one of our special guests for the show and was concerned his comments might be a bit controversial. Actually, I agree with him. He made some comments about the accuracy of AVMs versus live appraisers. I think his remarks were very interesting and well founded but they may not be well received. As you know, First American is an AVM developer, and also provides information that is used in other AVM models. Tune in on April 29th to see how his comments go over with lenders appraisers from around the country.

And I’ve had the pleasure of meeting a number of Canadian members of the NPPRA. As you may know, Canadian technology in this area is quite advanced. Canada had the first online land registry. We also routinely report on the work of BCE Emergis and Basis100, both Canadian firms. Enough on the technological virtues of our northern neighbors. What I’ve been impressed with is how seriously they take the work they do. They really consider themselves the custodians of these records, often handing the recording for their customers as well as the researching. I’m really looking forward to finding out more about what the NPPRA is working on this week.

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April 20, 2004

You may have noticed that yesterday I ran the story about Group 1's new solution for ESRI's GIS software. I'm sure many of you haven't come across this stuff much yet, but I think that's about to change. Our ability to tie data to a physical representation of a particular geography, a map, in other words, has some real power if we can learn to use it properly. Stewart is already working on this, as you read in the March 16 edition of RETI. County governments are also using this technology to good effect. We mentioned the work that Stanly County, North Carolina was doing in that article. County GIS coordinator Chad Coble told us that the county will shortly upgrade that system significantly. That story will be in the issue of RETI that hits your desk next Tuesday.

Ran another story that might have some of you scratching your heads today. BioPay says that over a million consumers have now signed up to use its biometric tools to make payments at gas stations, convenience stores and other retail outlets across the country. What does that have to do with our business? Biometric tools constitute a key ingredient if we want to make it possible for people to originate and close a real estate transaction over the Web. In fact, we recently covered a story about a newly formed alliance of companies in Calif. dedicated to electronic closing and recording. Safedocs, one of the partners in that alliance, specializes in this area.

I'm on the road for the rest of today, making my way down to Williamsburg, Vir., for the joint conference of the Real Estate Information Professionals Association and the National Public Record Research Association. More news from there tomorrow.

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April 19, 2004

The Mortgage Bankers Association is holding its secondary marketing conference in Washington today.

Sources on the exhibit hall floor tell us that the mood is somewhat somber. "Everyone has best execution on their minds and how to be more profitable on lower volumes," 3T Systems president Michael Detwiler told us today. "There's a definitely a more somber tenor of 'let's focus and figure out how to be more profitable on the business that we have."

By all accounts, attendance is similar to last year's show in New York, but the MBA has not released its numbers for the show yet.

But others were making announcements at the show, including BofA technology firm Framework. The company released its Workflow 3.0 product at the show today.

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