This is indicative of where technology is headed in general, no doubt.  Much of Twitter’s power, for example, and part of the reason for its explosive growth is its immediacy, because what constitutes ‘fresh’ news and what constitutes ‘old’ news is changing quite rapidly.

The news in the morning paper?  Whatever, that’s so totally, like, yesterday.

The same thing should be happening with listing syndication.

Point2 is a leader in the syndication of real estate listings, pulling listings in directly from your MLS (or directly from your Point2 Agent website where an MLS agreement is not yet in place).

We then send those listings out to over 40 high-traffic real estate marketplaces, and then send all of the clicks, views and leads back to our members.

We’re good at it.

But . . .

One thing that can always be improved upon in this arena is speed.  First, we collect listings from the MLS – but of course, some MLSs are only able to give us this data one per day.

Next, we perform transformer work with the inbound data, making it readable by our system, after which we do another transformation to make it readable by our syndication partners.

We’ve become quite fast at this step.

But . . .

Then, we send all of these listings, from cozy little fixer-uppers to rap star mansions replete with wall-to-wall bling, out to our network of syndication partners.  Of course this means another slight delay as we wait for them to perform the updates on their site.

As you can imagine, even though ours is one of the best, most efficient listing syndication systems in existence, there are still several delays in the chain.

And we don’t like it.

We’re a technology company, after all, with some of Canada’s brightest software developers – why can’t we go faster?

And what if we could go much faster?

What if it was a mere matter of minutes in between you as a REALTOR® entering a change into your MLS and that change appearing live on Trulia and a dozen (or a hundred) other marketplaces?

What if you could tell potential clients that, if they choose you as their listing agent, you can put their home in front of 10,000 homebuyers by sundown?

What if you could tell them that, if they choose you as their listing agent and price their home competitively, you would expect to have several inquiries for showings by noon tomorrow?

We think about this stuff a lot.  It’s not possible today, but it sure would be cool, wouldn’t it?