Filling the Void in Real Estate Education

The educational requirements for becoming a licensed real estate salesperson is low, very low. In the state of Florida, the minimum educational requirement is a high school diploma. Then again, this is well known by everyone due to the fact when there's an uptick in the housing sector, many attempt to sit for their respective state licensing exams to hopefully becoming residential agents. But, the problem is the licensing exam only covers the bare minimum for actual real estate knowledge and relative business concepts.

To thwart this void, I began researching missing areas not covered by the residential salesperson exam. The goal is provide additional education to those salespeople who need continuing education credits and to those who just want to increase their general knowledge. The courses will be online and use e-learning type methodologies.

For the first course, I am developing CRM1000 Introduction to Customer Relationship Management (CRM) in Real Estate. This course will explore theoretical concepts pertaining to the CRM value chain, the customer portfolio and retaining customers just to name a few areas. The key to the course is that the course material will remain theoretical in nature rather than a how-to with specificity. The benefit of this approach is relevancy and the ability to apply learning concepts to a variety of business activities using a vendor's CRM software solution since the course content abstracts proprietary solutions. Having said this, in the future I may develop a CRM course covering a specific solution such as Oracle CRM, Salesforce or SugarCRM.

Besides content modules, a syllabus will accompany the course for students to read and understand the course direction along with a required textbook, Customer Relationship Management by Francis Buttle. The current plan is offer multiple, two credit courses with a bundled version of eight or ten credits which offers students a choice of learning paths and tuition expenses. CRM1000 will be the first of many "missing" courses to improve the body of knowledge known as real estate as well as students' learning requirements within real estate.

--Corey

Continuing Education Course Development

From my research and and recent REEA conference trip, I realized a lack of technical and business type courses exist for real estate salespeople needing continuing education (CE) credits. The usual real estate CE courses cover ethics, law or other selling topics, however, my research shows other possible topics could be just as popular and important. But, the key to new course development is to remain theoretical in nature rather than developing a how to be successful salesperson course which would not be approved by any real estate state commission.

So this past month I began reading and researching a new topic for eventual CE course development. Customer Relationship Management is currently under development with associated course textbooks to accompany the online course. Using Moodle, I intend to publish this course and future courses online using e-learning methods and features. My goal is to have a beta version of the CRM course published online by the end of the month while submitting a course application to the Florida DBPR for CE approval. More CE courses will eventually be developed using this theoretical model along with applying real world use cases using specific software applications such as SalesForce and Google Apps.

--Corey

Evaluation Paper Excecutive Summary

The following is the executive summary from my evaluation paper entitled:

GR8C Accredited: Developing an Accreditation Program for OpenMLS® Registrars

This proposal was researched and developed for the Global Real Estate And Technology Consortium (GR8C). It specifies an accreditation review program for accrediting Candidate Registrars (CR) along with a compliance review for future registrar compliance after the accreditation phase. In addition, the proposal addresses current issues concerning current Multiple Listing Services (MLS) by creating a certification framework called the Accredited OpenMLS® Registrar (AOR) Program which includes three areas of evaluation: management, financial and information technology. These three areas are comprised of evaluation questions researched from the literature review.

The implementation plan begins with assembling an AOR Review Team. Once the team is assembled and properly trained, an open application window phase is initiated and slated for June 1, 2013. Online applications are accepted and reviewed by the AOR Review Team until the close of the open application window phase which closes August 30, 2013. The AOR Review Team performs background checks, management reviews, financial status inquiries and technology experience credentials before rendering a decision of approval or rejection for accreditation status. The AOR Review Team will also conduct randomly selected compliance reviews of AORs for continuous compliance. With the AOR Program and Compliance Program fully operational, future AOR application windows will open to more candidate registrars globally for potential accreditation and ongoing compliance.

All dates are tentative.

--Corey

Accredited OpenMLS Registrar Process

This past week, I finished one of my ucf graduate courses covering evaluation of nonprofit programs and activities. The textbook was called Evaluation: A Systematic Approach.

From my research and course work, I developed the above diagram which depicts the process for accrediting OpenMLS® Registrars in the near future. This is a beta version, however, it does encompass and satisfy evaluating requirements, documents, and supporting information for accrediting third-party organizations for becoming a fully, functional OpenMLS® connecting to the World Wide MLS (WWMLS) over the Internet.

I intend to publish the paper I submitted for this course on my papers website. The paper's title is GR8C Accredited: Developing an Accreditation Program for OpenMLS® Registrars.

--Corey

Real Estate Science Abstract

Last week, I submitted a three sentence proposal to present at the Real Estate Educators Association conference which will take place at Morehead University, Kentucky this upcoming August. The topic of my proposal is on Real Estate Science and why the industry needs a new scientific field of study.

Below is the full abstract for the upcoming paper entitled, "Real Estate Science: The Rise of a New Scientific Field of Study":

The Internet and World Wide Web have been immensely influential factors on the real estate industry. From sales brokerages to daily activities by salespeople, computers are involved in every facet of today's real estate businesses' projects and transactions. With millions of mobile and office devices connected to the Internet, the real estate industry has fully embraced and embedded technology within every layer of itself. Thus, one can say that technology has transformed the real estate industry from a one-dimensional industry centered solely around financial analysis into a mission critical, technology dependent industry overnight.

To better understand how the Internet and the World Wide Web have affected the Real Estate Industry, this paper proposes a new scientific field of study to help analyze, study, theorize and document relevant scientific discoveries so the real estate industry may continue to grow with necessary efficiency and technical relevancy. This paper discusses the needs and justifications for a new academic discipline called Real Estate Science (Re-Sci) which combines the theories and concepts from the Real Estate and Computer Science academic fields, respectively. It also investigates other industries which have already embraced Computer Science as an academic component by comparing and contrasting their industry characteristics and evolutions. In addition, current trends and potential use cases will be presented to demonstrate why Real Estate Science is necessary to define and continue to evolve into a beneficial academic research area for everyone involved in the real estate industry presently and into the future.

If accepted, I will also publish the paper on my papers website.

--Corey

RDASE: Research Development Activity Service Engine

Above is a diagram depicting the Research Development Activity Service Engine for the GR8C. The term paper for this diagram is published online on my papers site.

--Corey

Academic and Scientific Papers Website

This past weekend I worked on publishing my science paper presented at ARES on the Multiple Listing Service Network Protocol to a new site for my academic and scientific papers.

Following up the MLSN paper, I will next publish my nonprofit term paper on RDASE: The Anatomy of the Research Development Activity Service Engine. This paper's aim is to develop a workflow framework for the GR8C covering new research, publishing papers, and grant submissions.

Moving forward, I have started preliminary research on my next paper, Real Estate Science: The Rise of a New Scientific Field of Study. This paper will be submitted to the 2013 ARES conference which will be held in Kona, Hawaii (aka my hometown). In addition, I plan to submit a second paper to ARES either on Real Estate Transport Protocol (RETP) or Real Estate Geographic Names System (REGNS).

--Corey

MLSN Protocol Slides From 2012 ARES Conference

[slideshare id=12602912&doc=120419gr8ccleongaresmlsnpaperslides-120419083504-phpapp01]

Above are the slides from my talk from the American Real Estate Society Conference just recently held in St. Petersburg, Florida.

--Corey

Nonprofit Science Fair Exhibit MLSN Protocol

Next week, I will participate in the 2012 Noprofit Technology Conference Science Fair hosted in San Francisco.

Below is the exhibit board I developed for depicting and explaining Multiple Listing Service Network Protocol.

By clicking the exhibit image above, a larger version of the image is displayed.

--Corey

Cloud Computing Talk PRIA Winter Symposium 2012

[slideshare id=11825903&doc=cleonggr8cpriawintersymposiumcloudcomputing-ppt-120301211157-phpapp02]

Above are my slides from last week's PRIA Winter Symposium 2012 hosted in Washington DC. The panel session's topic was on cloud computing and the property records industry. Enjoy and feel free to comment or ask questions.

--Corey

Creating The Real Estate Science Logo

To capture the essence of Real Estate and Computer Science in a logo, an icon was needed to mesh or connect the two knowledge areas together. In doing so, the above two-dimensional icon within the re-sci logo is a graph which simply represents a connected world. Using graph theory, ten nodes or vertices are connected by lines or edges. The nodes are colored blue and green to represent water and land, respectively, while the addition of edges create universally accepted home icons within the logo's icon.

Custom blue and green colors were chosen for the textual lettering to match the nodes' coloring. The font face used was PakType Tehree with a medium style. Inkscape was used to create the re-sci logo, .

Purposefully, multiple home icons can be found within the 2d graph icon. Just like a multiple listing service, this type of design was used to represent a global mls or a world wide mls. In future versions, the icon graph may become three-dimensional and much larger in scale.

At first glance, you may notice only two home icons within the icon graph, but if you look closely there are many more. Please feel free to comment below on how many hidden home icons you see located within the new re-sci icon graph. :)

The Real Estate Science logo can now be found on ResearchGate.net and on Twitter @rescience.

--Corey