The Latest & The Greatest (for FREE) from RPR with Liz Tewksbury

When it comes to exploring the full potential of real estate tools, it’s crucial not to miss out on the gems that are right under our noses.

Today, we’re diving into some of the most powerful features and updates from RPR (Realtors Property Resource) that you can access for free.

I'm joined by Liz Tewksbury, a seasoned expert with 15 years under her belt, ready to shed light on RPR’s most impactful tools and features. Liz takes us through the cutting-edge enhancements that make RPR indispensable for real estate professionals, from streamlined data access to new mobile functionalities. 

With her insights, we explore how these tools not only simplify processes but also enrich your service offerings with robust, accessible data.

So, make sure to catch this episode for a deep dive into the powerful resources available at RPR.

Specifically, this episode highlights the following themes:

• Integration and use of RPR in daily real estate operations
• Updates and new features in RPR
• Strategic advantages of data utilization in real estate

Links from this episode:

• Get to know more about ​​Liz Tewksbury: https://www.linkedin.com/in/liztewksbury
• Learn more about RPR: https://blog.narrpr.com

1ae5b43598204883b524f061d4880e6d10fca88c (for podfollow.com)

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 0:58 About Liz Tewksbury
• 6:13 Realtors merge data into RPR seamlessly
• 7:33 Realtors access nationwide listings through RPR platform
• 13:30 Market script writer provides awesome market trend reports
• 15:51 Demo showcased ad listing workflow with generative AI

Transcript

Liz Tewksbury [00:00:00]:
The deep links that you can build from your MLS system out to RPR are really beneficial for those first time users to start to access RPR and get a feel for what we do and what is available for them within the RPR tool. But for those that do choose to just go into RPR on their own, one of the great things that we've done is actually created guided tours. So if you are somebody new, you can come into the RPR tool and get a little tour that leads you through what you really want to be looking at, how to do a property search, what are you seeing on the map? And it really does guide you through the process and make it a little less overwhelming when you're going into a system for the first time.

Matt Fowler [00:00:45]:
Hey everybody, thanks for coming out today to another Triangle MLS podcast. Today we have my old friend Liz Tewksbury from RPR. Liz, I'll let you introduce yourself and maybe tell everybody where we ran into each other first.

Liz Tewksbury [00:00:58]:
Oh sure, absolutely. So hello everyone. Liz Tewksbury. I'm the senior director of industry relations here at RPR, but like Matt, worn many hats in this industry. And so Matt and I go way back when roles were reversed and I worked at a large regional MLS here in New England and Matt happened to be working in since then, our paths always seem to cross and here we are yet again.

Matt Fowler [00:01:21]:
Yeah, I think we've both had a few brands since then, Liz, but that was fun. That was one of my favorite projects. It's still, its still the most popular portal that weve published. I definitely use it as a benchmark still. I tell my people all the time that the best organizations benchmark against better organizations and they figure out how they do that and try and get better. And were launching a consumer portal. We just did. It went up last week and were hopeful that in the year two or three we can start having some of those numbers.

Matt Fowler [00:01:57]:
But RPR is something that, it's on the dashboard when people log in through a Triangle. It's something that I know our members hear about a lot. It is an association member benefit, if I characterize that correctly, and it's super deep. And I want to make sure the reason we're having this podcast today is we do with all of our technology providers, is that I think most people understand that they use about 15% of the software's capacity that they use every day and we want to really make sure they understand what's out there. So we just use RPR to do some really meaningful stuff. In a recent merger, before we get to all that. I'd love to hear, Liz, from you about, I don't know, your favorite things to talk about this year. As the industry relations person about RPR, you know, what's current, what the Maasa tribers need to know is sitting there for them to use.

Liz Tewksbury [00:02:55]:
Sure. You know, to your point, Matt, there are so many pieces and so many incredible things that we could talk about when it comes to RPR. I'll start off with just a real high level of who we are. For those folks that might not know RPR, that stands for realtors property resource. We are a national parcel centric database made up of residential as well as commercial properties. Our tool is built exclusively for realtors. And more importantly, I always like to say what RPR is not. RPR does not have any consumer access.

Liz Tewksbury [00:03:28]:
So it is truly a realtor only product for you to get access to your mls. But as well as from a number of other data sources that we bring into the RPR ecosystem, ultimately, RPR's goal is simply just to create efficiencies for realtors so that they can better serve consumers. We want to provide data and technology that really helps realtors to demonstrate their market knowledge. And the big one is, and we hear this a lot right now, it's a buzzword, but it truly is to continue to reinforce that realtor value.

Matt Fowler [00:04:02]:
Yeah, you mean it's when you pull a report out of our pr, you have a lot of options to do that. I know our people have technology provided by their brokers. We have reports I know you can get from realist if you're using Matrix on our platform, they can pull reports from CR's tax suite if they're using flex or paragon. But RPR really reaches across all of those things and it's another resource that you have. And I'm about to build a house. And one of the things I did was pull up the lot that we just bought in RPR and was astonished, frankly, at what's there. I mean, that's a really significant amount of information. You said parcel Citric.

Matt Fowler [00:04:41]:
Liz, explain that to our usage a little bit.

Liz Tewksbury [00:04:45]:
Sure. So obviously, we power RPR using MLS listing data. So that's all of the information that you input into your MLS system we have displayed on the listings. But you, maybe you want to see what's going on down the street in some of those homes that aren't on the market. Well, you can, you know, pull up the map and see what anything and everything about the properties that are surrounding it. So maybe you are looking for more public record information or tax data, perhaps some heat maps or you want to just get, get in and look at the historical data that might be available. We also have things like FEMA flood maps that are integrated directly into the, into the product. We pull school reports in.

Liz Tewksbury [00:05:29]:
Everything that you could possibly want to know we think is available within the RPR tool.

Matt Fowler [00:05:36]:
Yeah, I think that would just be mandatory for a listing presentation. I know people have their own, their own process for doing that, obviously. And some people are know make that a real science. But this is free sitting in the dashboard for you to just go and, and see what you can learn about that neighborhood. I was looking to see if the neighborhood, the neighbors had adus that had been recently built, indicating that those were not just allowed, but happening in the neighborhood, at accessory dwelling units, like a mother in law suite in the backyard sort of thing. Those are really popular. And I was trying to figure out if it was happening in that, in that neighborhood. And they were.

Matt Fowler [00:06:13]:
So I was talking about the merger earlier. This is just another lens to think about RPR and just what's there. Our subscribers will remember the alamance merger from about a year and a half ago, where the nearby Burlington Alamance association of Realtors merged their allomance, mls into Triangle. So all the Burlington Alamance County association members are now Triangle subscribers. And when we sat down to look at the project sequencing, how is this going to go? Well, when could we get the data in a place where we could share it? We realized that it was already together in RPR. We reached out to our rep and said, if we understand how this works, does that mean that you could just make an administrative change or a licensing change to the way the system works and commingle these data? They said, yeah, sure, absolutely. Do you want to do it this week or next week? And we weren't quite ready for an answer. That was weeks, not months.

Matt Fowler [00:07:13]:
So we had to go back and make sure we had our communications in place. But it was the first place that the merge dataset was available and people were logging in and using the RPR version of the data almost a year before the rest of the systems were completed. So that's a nice little success story.

Liz Tewksbury [00:07:33]:
Yeah, and you know, we hear a lot of, and it's interesting, your members actually, they have access to your listing data and then any that you choose to reciprocate, sharing data with when we talk about all of your listing data. But your agents also have access to all listings across the nation, right? So they can look and see some listing data from. We have 275 MLS's across the country that participate in what we call RPR view. So there are so many opportunities for them to maybe get a feel for what might be happening in other areas of the country. And by doing that and having the ability to quickly share data between markets, that obviously the success of that comes from RiSo data standards and the work that we've done behind the scenes to really create a scenario where we can be nimble and quickly make that data available. But we've seen that it is really successful. Last year alone we had 553,000 realtors that access the RPR platform. So that's a really big number of realtors that are coming in every single day not only to look at listings in their market, but look for listings elsewhere, including within Triangle MLS.

Matt Fowler [00:08:50]:
That is a big number. More than a half a million. Wow, that's a lot. I've heard a little evidence of it, but I'm hopeful that people logging in to look at the elements data might have been accessing ArcpLr for the first time, or don't normally find themselves going back in there often because they're always in their MLS platform. We just introduced MLS front end of choice in November. Tomorrow is actually June. Well, whenever this runs. But tomorrow is the deadline when you have to pick which one you want.

Matt Fowler [00:09:20]:
I really want our subscribers to get unstuck from the one application that they've used for ten years and learn that there are other tools out there. You can present a different look and feel to your customers. It doesn't have to be the one that comes in the box with your MLS membership. We're really trying to build innovation and creativity into that process. RPR is part of that because we're going to try to build more deep links into RPR throughout the platform so that it becomes more present in the workflows. It's a very valuable resource. It's half a million is a lot, but it's underutilized, I know in our market, because when we go out and talk about it and ask people, do you use RPR? We get some blank stare sometimes. So we want to get past that.

Liz Tewksbury [00:10:13]:
Yeah. The deep links that you can build from your MLS system out to RPR are really beneficial for those first time users to start to access RPR and get a feel for what we do and what is available for them within the RPR tool. But for those that do choose to just go into RPR on their own, one of the great things that we've done is actually created guided tours. So if you are somebody new, you can come into the RPR tool and get a little tour that leads you through what you really want to be looking at. How to do a property search, what are you seeing on the map? And it really does guide you through the process and make it a little less overwhelming when going into a system for the first time.

Matt Fowler [00:10:57]:
Yeah, that's really helpful. So people can just go through that whenever they want.

Liz Tewksbury [00:11:00]:
Yep, yep. And lots of training, obviously, always available. I think you. I think you all put that up on your. On your training calendar as well.

Matt Fowler [00:11:09]:
Yeah, we do offer quite a bit of training, and I really like the videos and the, like on screen guides, the walk me or whatever, those things, because, you know, most of our people are doing their work and are working all day. Right. And they're driving people around and they get to this stuff later. And on the weekends, I want it to be asynchronously delivered. So it's not on my schedule. It's on your schedule. I love that RPR is leaning into that.

Liz Tewksbury [00:11:34]:
Yeah. And off to our mobile platform, rather. You know, we're finding more and more folks. You know, everybody always has their phone nearby. Everybody doesn't always have computer nearby. What's great about the mobile solution is, especially if you're out at a property, you can, you know, open it up and click near me on the map and get the information that you need for your listing right there without having to, you know, log into somewhere and run a search or. Or even if you're. I like to do, when I'm out for a walk and I see a new house just came on the market, I always love to stay near me and.

Liz Tewksbury [00:12:04]:
And check that house out. So it's a really great tool when you're on the go to.

Matt Fowler [00:12:08]:
Sure, for sure. I've used that. It is really cool. You know, I also have the flex Pro one on my phone. Homespotter. I mean, I've got a bunch of them, you know, and I've also got three weather apps that I rely on in different ways, you know, and again, it's making the point get unstuck from the one thing you've always used. You know, try a different tool and maybe you go back to the other one. Maybe, maybe you love that.

Matt Fowler [00:12:33]:
But if you're a professional and you're 2024 and you're using the same tool you used in 2014, well, it doesn't look like 2014 out there anymore. And I think it's important to go.

Liz Tewksbury [00:12:46]:
To the dashboard because when I knew you, Matt, this is. I'm not going to say when, because then people are going to know how old we really are.

Matt Fowler [00:12:54]:
But my camera's on. Is my camera on? They can tell. Yeah.

Liz Tewksbury [00:12:58]:
Right. But, you know, the RPR that I knew back then is so very different than the RPR that it is today. It's really amazing to see how the product has grown. And I'm sure that's the case with so many of the products that are out there. You know, in particular, what I was, had my, my biggest mind blown moment when I came over to RPR and saw the changes they had made. But the market trend scriptwriter, I don't know if you've had a chance to look at that. Do you know about it or, you.

Matt Fowler [00:13:28]:
Know, I'm not sure I do know what that is.

Liz Tewksbury [00:13:30]:
Okay, so it's better if I demo it, but obviously we're not going to do that. But just to give you a little overview. But the market script writer, market trends, I think we all know what we're trying to do. Find out what's happening in the market, right? So you maybe put in a zip code and single family, and it, this zip code, and it runs a market trends report. What we heard from people, we do a lot of user testing. We constantly have at our system telling us where we should go, what we could do better, and really making the product work for practitioners. And what they told us was, your market trends report is awesome. The data that you get from it really does tell the story of what's going on.

Liz Tewksbury [00:14:11]:
But if I'm a brand new agent, I don't really even know how to tell that story. Right.

Matt Fowler [00:14:16]:
It's really hard to put together. Yeah.

Liz Tewksbury [00:14:17]:
Yeah. I don't know how to read the reports and be able to have a conversation with a buyer or a seller about what these reports really mean. So that was one thing we heard. Another thing was, you know, other folks who would say, hi, I know I need to be on social media more, promoting myself, promoting my brand, promoting what's going on in the market. I'm just not good at it. I don't know how to write the content. So we actually integrated ChatGPT into our market trends report. And so it's called the AI script writer.

Liz Tewksbury [00:14:47]:
You go in, yeah, you run your market trends report, and then you can just choose your audience, you can choose your tone, and you say, you know, is this for a social media post or, you know, is this just for an email that I'm writing to somebody? And it will spit out what you probably should be saying about what the market trends report came up with.

Matt Fowler [00:15:08]:
That is so cool. Liz. I think that most of my subscribers looked at RPR if they did a while ago right? Like they wouldn't know that that was there. So we're going to want to, while we're talking to them, more about these options and the choices that they have for doing things. ChatGPT into the, you know, to integrate into the stats presentation is just really smart. I love that our subscribers have access to that and we'll make sure they know about it.

Liz Tewksbury [00:15:35]:
I thought it was one of the greatest things when I came over to RPR six months ago and we actually rolled it out in commercial recently too. I've got to familiarize myself with it a little bit more before I can speak intelligently about it because we just released it, but interested to see what that one looks like as well.

Matt Fowler [00:15:51]:
In commercial we just saw a demo of an ad listing workflow that has a ChatGPT like generative AI remarks as you said with all the different phones and thats really interesting where thats going and its really changing so quickly. So I guess thats the primary message that id probably like to leave my subscribers with that. We just heard Liz talk about really a significant level of investment in the product, starting with user testing which is not inexpensive to new features. The mobile app this is not your grandmothers RPR so we want to really get the message out that they need to go check it out.

Liz Tewksbury [00:16:30]:
Well thank you. We appreciate that. It is not your grandma's RPR. It really has come a long way and I'm super impressed by it and I think your folks will be too.

Matt Fowler [00:16:39]:
Yeah, me too. And I'm really glad you're there. We have a good contact with RPM.