Data has become so valuable, so vital to real estate that it has earned its own room in the C-suite. With more and more major real estate companies investing in the gathering, application and understanding of data, Bright MLS announced last week that it was bringing in Tom Morgan, formerly of Anywhere, as its new Chief Data Officer (CDO). The newly created position will focus on making sure real estate data becomes more useful, more accurate and more secure for everyone who depends on it.
Morgan sat down (virtually) with RISMedia to discuss his priorities, the power of MLS and all the ways data is powering real estate.
Editor’s note: this interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
RISMedia: Can you give me an overview of your approach to data, and where it is currently not being utilized in ways that could benefit real estate practitioners, and the industry at large?
Tom Morgan: Real estate is fundamentally a matching optimization problem between leads and listings. That’s what it comes down to. You’re essentially trying to match the product with your consumer. The MLS sits right in the epicenter of those two data elements, and we see a lot of opportunity in optimizing the matching around this. That’s what’s really attractive to me about where Bright and the MLS is positioned today.
RISMedia: The idea is simply that you’re able to better connect people who want to buy or sell a home with the people who want to help them, am I getting that right?
TM: Absolutely, and there’s also the ancillary effort into increasing the quality around listing, expanding the breadth of what makes a listing the right listing that attracts an eyeball, understanding the propensity of consumers and what their expectations are, what their interests are—what types of attributes we present that provides a compelling reason to click. All that is driven by data. We improve the process using data.
RISMedia: Data is valuable to real estate practitioners to provide to consumers. How do you get raw data that is useful to an agent—or is that even something you’re trying to do?
TM: I believe the agent is trying to support consumer desires. What does a prospect want to understand about my sales record, as an agent, or want to understand about comps, or want to understand about interest rates? Those are really insights, they aren’t raw data. We often do a disservice to agents, to brokers and even to consumers by not generating digestible insights, and instead provide spreadsheets or raw numbers that are not easily leveraged.
I’ll give you an example. When I sit down in my car, I punch in a destination in my GPS and the map spits back at me—not 15 possible routes to get there. It spits back to me “the blue line.” That’s all I want as a consumer, is “the blue line.” And I believe that’s what consumers want. They want the blue line, they want the answer—not 12 different answers.
RISMedia: The amount of data is something I keep hearing about. Have you ever thought in your career, ‘Gosh, I wish I just had more data?’ And at Bright, are you seeing the opportunity to get enough data to do more interesting things, and understand better what is going on in real estate?
TM: The more data we have, the more accurate our models are going to be. Bright being such a player and having the transaction volume and listing volume increases the opportunity. There’s historical data going back decades, and that is all leverageable for understanding behavior patterns, understanding property evolution, which can increase the types of features and the types of products we can offer to subscribers and associations.
RISMedia: There’s a new emphasis in data at some companies, including Bright. Can you talk about how Bright has approached data, and what about that is exciting to you?
TM: As I walked through the door and as I was getting to know Bright, one of the things that really impressed me was how far they are along in their digital journey already. A lot of the MLSs across the country are still on premise, in co-loads. Bright is fully cloud-based, now cloud-native for new feature sets. There’s quite a foundation to build on there. The velocity in which we can build new features, new products and provide these offerings to subscribers, associations is increased with the cloud capability, the cloud platform as our foundation.
RISMedia: Another thing is data quality. That’s something I hear come up a lot—square footage, different definitions, etc. How do you approach the challenge of getting the best quality data?
TM: In the data industry, there are known dimensions of data quality. Once you understand what you’re measuring against, you can measure each record and each field in each record, to understand whether it’s a complete field, is it a timely field, is it a consistent field. By doing that on every record we see, we can bring the quality of records to match our reference set. It’s defining that reference set first, and then comparing that with what we’re seeing on a day-to-day basis as we generate new records.
And the final piece is making updates to the point of entry so that we’re prophylactically ensuring that the data that’s entered meets our data quality standards. It might be asking for fields that are required—that’s one type of validation that improves data accuracy. You’ve probably seen masks applied to the UI to ensure you’re including an area code. All of those things improve data quality at the point of capture, which is really where we can make the most impact.
RISMedia: It sounds like this is one of the more important things for a real estate professional—how you’re collecting data.
TM: Absolutely. There’s going to be a core set of fields that are involved in the everyday transactions. So property descriptions—ensuring that has complete sentences and has enticing content that eyeballs are attracted to—that’s pretty important. Square footage, having an accurate square footage number—that’s pretty important. So there’s a handful of fields that get used over and over again in the prospecting and sales process that we can increase the quality of.
RISMedia: Coming from a brokerage to the MLS side, what does that change look like from your job?
TM: Everyone can see that there is a revolution occurring in the real estate industry and the impact of technology on how consumers buy homes—that’s all changing, and that’s happening in our lifetime and right in front of our eyes. I believe the most leverage for that innovation will occur around three things: policy, data and process. And those are going to be the highest leverage points for us to be able to ensure that we are on the winer’s side in this revolution that’s occurring
The MLS is in the sweet spot for all three of those leverage points, and for me, that is why I am interested in being part of the Bright team, because I believe the Bright team is not only in the middle of policy, data and process, but is the largest player in that ecosystem.
