Meet the Board: John Wood – Bridging Gaps in Real Estate Data Access

We're back with another episode of the Meet The Board Series, where we talk to industry leaders shaping the future of real estate. Today, we focus on the significant shifts happening in the MLS world.

In this episode, I’m joined by John Wood, a seasoned real estate professional and member of the Doorify MLS Board of Directors. John shares his journey from starting in the industry back in 1988 to his current role in reshaping how MLS serves its members. We talk about the transition from Triangle MLS to Doorify and the efforts to improve data sharing across regions. 

He discusses challenges and progress in making MLS more user-friendly for agents while prioritizing data accuracy. John also explains why keeping agents at the center of data access is crucial for the future. 

Tune in to hear how these changes will impact you and what’s coming next.

Specifically, this episode highlights the following themes:

• The new technology enabling faster data access
• Importance of local expertise in real estate
• Future plans for MLS integration across regions

Links from this episode:

• Know more about John Wood: https://www.remax.com/real-estate-agents/john-wood-cary-nc/100016002
• Learn more about Doorify MLS: https://doorifymls.com
• Learn more about Compass: https://www.compass.com

1ae5b43598204883b524f061d4880e6d10fca88c (for podfollow.com)

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 2:47 About John Wood
• 5:41 Buyers await lower rates; marketplace tipping point
• 8:49 Facing challenges, improving, offering new choices
• 11:37 New tech boosts efficiency, enhances business operations
• 14:32 Enhancing MLS data for better market insights
• 17:17 Unify MLS data access for local agents
• 19:39 Proving best MLS infrastructure with improvements

Transcript

John Wood [00:00:00]:
Were to go out to the Nash county, to Rocky Mount. There is not a single MLS that has all of the data in that Nashville and Rocky Mound area. Some of it is in Doorify, some of it is in the Down east regional site. And would love to have that consumer looking in that market and to be able to go, hey, I like that list and that list and the agent to have immediate access to all of that data. We're here to try to make sure the agents are the experts in the area and that some national portal is not the king of data, that the agent is the king of the data and that they can take that and provide their client the best information possible.

Matt Fowler [00:00:41]:
Hi Everybody, it's Matt Fowler again. I'm the executive director of DoorifyMLS.com. We recently changed our name from triangle MLS after a lot of years being triangle. We'll talk about that a little bit with our special guest today, who is John Wood from our board of directors. Hey, John.

John Wood [00:00:58]:
Hey Matt, how you doing?

Matt Fowler [00:00:59]:
I'm just fantastic. Enjoying talking to my board as I always do. Thanks for giving us a few minutes out of what I know is your busy schedule. We talk a lot, John, since you and I spend a good bit of time together. People who don't know our subscribers watching today, the triangle board commitment is pretty significant. We meet eleven times a year, but John and I talk between the meetings quite a bit. We go to industry meetings where we kind of learn what's going on and how other people are solving problems. So today we're just here to, to hear from John about his board service and a little bit about John Wood and where you came from.

Matt Fowler [00:01:34]:
John, we always kick off these conversations with what does something that most people maybe don't know about John Wood.

John Wood [00:01:40]:
Well, obviously that question comes with lots of things I could do. But probably the one thing is I am not tar heel born, but I am tar heel bred. As I tell people, I got here as soon as I could walk. I grew up in North Hills when North Hills was the end of Raleigh and backed up the Shelly road. And you know, so much is now that's called Midtown. So it's, you know, growing up and watched all of the changes over the years. And you know, what we all love about the triangle is that it's ever providing opportunities. Yes, traffic can be a problem now and then, but we all know if we're not growing, we're dying.

John Wood [00:02:14]:
And we're blessed to be growing. And that's, that's my focus, always is making sure that we're a growing area and whatever I can do to help that.

Matt Fowler [00:02:21]:
Yeah. Thanks, John. I think grow or die is something that came up at a meeting just recently. We were talking about triangle transitioning into Doorify. We're taking the kind of location based name away, like Canopy did or like prime did or like bright. Right?

John Wood [00:02:37]:
Exactly. Yeah.

Matt Fowler [00:02:39]:
Just try to think about growth is something that we think about inside that room. So when did you get into real estate? You're a REMAX guy, right?

John Wood [00:02:47]:
Yeah. So I started in real estate in 1988, so it's been 36 years now. Started and ended up going into new homes fairly soon after getting in the business and spent about nine years on site and gave me a tremendous education about how the business works and how the houses are put together and had really great builders who were willing to spend time with me to explain why they built things the way they did.

Matt Fowler [00:03:12]:
That's really interesting. I mean, you literally got to see it from the inside out working on site.

John Wood [00:03:17]:
Oh, and I had five custom builders for the first couple years I was in it. Then I was at a site with 18 and I learned a lot about how the custom building world worked. Never represented a production type builder, but learned a lot. Dragged some of the great names of building right into their houses and made them explain why they did two by fours headers versus two by ten headers in places. Why they, what, wouldn't go to polybutylene piping, the greatest new thing in the nineties that. Remember Frank Roebuck saying, we're just good with copper and boy, you know how right he was.

Matt Fowler [00:03:53]:
Yeah. Wow. It died there. We've all, I've been around since 90, gosh, three as my first real estate job, so. But you've been around through a bunch of cycles, John. That's got to give you some. I don't know. They call that wisdom.

John Wood [00:04:08]:
Well, it's funny, back in the early nineties we would tell people, people come in and talk about we're in a recession. And I remember telling people who came from other parts, yes, but we've chosen not to participate in this one and because our growth was so good and yes, you know, we've really had one downturn to speak of since I've been in a business and that was really, didn't really hit us hard until late zero eight and into zero nine and ten. But we've been really fortunate to just always have a, a thriving market. And yes, one time, one cycle where prices went down, but otherwise they have stabilized. And a couple years ago we saw them shoot up at a level we've never seen, 20 and 30% appreciation. And while we enjoyed those days to a point, I'm not sure that's healthy. Hope if we can get in that five to 10% appreciation, that's healthy for our market.

Matt Fowler [00:04:59]:
Steven? Yeah, that does seem to be happening. Our partnership with the uncle flagner business, business school, it's hard to get that one out. We have these quarterly phone calls with profs, and they were saying just that, that we're looking at a stabilized mortgage environment, significant inbound migration in our area. Our issue remains inventory, even though we're back up to something that looks a little bit more like normal this fall. So tell me a little bit about in your office, you're meeting with your people all the time. Youre looking at big changes that happened this year on a national level. What are you telling them about next year and how to prepare for the next cycle in 2025?

John Wood [00:05:41]:
Steven were certainly hoping that as interest rates stabilize and possibly continue to have a little downward pressure, that the buyers who are sitting on the sideline will come back out. Weve talked a lot about the tipping point of where is that tipping point? To get somebody to move out of their current home, that they have a three, three and a half, 4% mortgage and be willing to accept a 6% give or take mortgage. Brian Muffini was quoted recently saying 5.8% is what he thinks is that tipping point to get more people out into the marketplace. We got close to that a couple of weeks ago and then eventually a little higher, back over six again with rates. But I think people's lives have changed. And while the nice rates are wonderful, I mean, we have to realize that people have added family, lost family for various reasons, and jobs changed jobs and people need to move. And what we're lacking right now is that local flow of listing opportunities. And unfortunately, the builders can't build enough to keep up with it.

John Wood [00:06:43]:
And that continues that shortage. And sure, a little bit of extra inventory right now is helpful, but I think we need more, and we need more of the houses that people have loved and put in the right condition and the right price to get sold in a timely manner.

Matt Fowler [00:06:57]:
Yeah, I guess that's something. If you own a house and you're listening, I think this is a great time to sell. Going into this next market, values remain high. John was just talking about how much they went up. Those have, those have not gone back to pre Covid levels. These are still the sales that we see now are retaining for the most part that value that we've seen, which is great, it lets you fix up your house with the HeLOC or something like that, or I move on to the next one. So moving over to the. To the company a little bit here.

Matt Fowler [00:07:24]:
John, three years ago when I started on this job, you were one of the small group that talked to me about coming here and we talked about doing things like running it more like a business. That's something that a lot of MLS has talked about around the country and now we've made some changes. Some of them you and I scheduled in a fairly ambitious schedule, I think we would both agree. And then we had stuff added to it. Bye. You know, things we couldn't have seen coming. The result of that was a really compressed 2024, I think you could say 2023 and four. I want to talk a little bit about your.

Matt Fowler [00:07:59]:
Just reflect on that project. I'm changing our name here just to set you up for that. We've been talking these other calls about our new B two B two C language that we've been using just to make it very clear to the subscribers that, you know, they're very much in the most important constituent that we think about in our business. They're the, we're a b two b business. We think of ourselves. But recently with the help of, I think, some real visionaries and people that we, we respected the industry. It's wrong to ignore the c, the consumer. And what we're doing in connecting people to property is helping you do that.

Matt Fowler [00:08:37]:
Is helping the broker in the middle actually be the person that's connecting with that consumer, hopefully in a sub second way with our new technology. So tell us how you feel about going through that process.

John Wood [00:08:49]:
As we all know, we've had some challenges and some hiccups and some unintended consequences. And that frustration has been there by all of us. And I think that's what's lost sometimes is that there's not a person, whether it's in your staff or in your board or certainly out within the realtor community. We've all had our hiccups and our issues, but I think it was all done in the interest of how do we make ourselves better and how can we be better. And I think we're there at that point a little longer year to get here than what we thought. But I think that moving forward we've got a lot of talk about we're no longer going to be pushing where you need to go for a choice. You're going to have those options and I think you've done a good analogy of we've got the vending machine and you get there, and as a subscriber, there are certain things in that vending machine that are included in the ability of walking up to that vending machine for your typical subscription. But you can have some options to look at things beyond there.

John Wood [00:09:47]:
And that is something that we have not historically as an MLS offered, which was other products, whether it was CMA products or marketing pieces or possibly down the road photography and other choices and even other more consumer focused MLS platforms. And the AI where we're going with that, you know, our subscribers need to understand, is we're going to have those available for those who want to go there, but for those who don't, you know, we're not going to push you to go there. You've made a choice. As soon as we get through this last little twist over with Paragon, your choices are made and you should be good. And if you want to explore something else, please do. But I think what everyone's missing is that if we had not done it the way we've done, we still would have had a transition to a new product because Paragon was changing and they had to change and they knew that. And that was lost a little bit on everybody, is that it was past time for a change. The pandemic delayed our change.

John Wood [00:10:41]:
We were looking at 2019 or 20 to actually change just MLS vendors, and now we've just gone a different way. And the value of that for some people will be a while before they understand it fully.

Matt Fowler [00:10:52]:
Yeah, I get that for most people, the Paragon system was just disrupted and that's what they felt. But as you said, John, Paragon was going to be replaced with Paragon Connect at some point anyway, and this has allowed our back end to be replaced. The whole database has been updated. I know people don't really see that, but it is present. If we were to have an outage, we're safer than almost any other MLS in the country in terms of outages because we have alternate ways to deal with that data. We're very close to have a second way to add and edit listings in the system that's going to come out in first quarter. Just to illustrate, you mentioned the AIH product. This is something that we wouldn't have even been available to us because it's not coming from Ice or Black Knight.

Matt Fowler [00:11:37]:
So since we got everything from them, and that's the business model that we were using until they came out with it, we couldn't use it. So we were, we were trapped at innovating at the speed of that one company. And now that you were able to plug stuff into that vending machine you were talking about, we're about to offer to people who want to use it an amazing jaw dropping piece of technology that lets you upload media and then it basically fills out the input form for you with less errors in a way that's more complete than if a human does it. And if you've got 100 listings to manage, this is going to improve your efficiency in a dramatic way. And it's things like that that I think we want to be among the first markets in the country that have something like that. And it cost a lot, I acknowledge, to get us to a point where we could bring stuff like that in. But we're here now and we intend to spend 2025 making sure that the members know how much we value them and showing them how much the new systems are going to make their businesses work better.

John Wood [00:12:44]:
Absolutely.

Matt Fowler [00:12:45]:
So don, give us a little more about what you guys do inside the boardroom. Right. So we meet eleven times a year. We are talking about these brands, we're talking about new products coming in, we're talking about the rule changes, how to work better with the MLS's around us. We spend a lot of time benchmarking against MLS's that we feel are in our cohort and our group, we're the 33rd largest in the country. So looking at the ones that are maybe, you know, 20 to 35 or something, that group, we look and see, you know, what's their staffing like? What are the ratios to membership? What tasks do they take on? What would you like to say to the subscribers about how the new orientation sets us up to look at growth and how we fit in the MLS landscape?

John Wood [00:13:31]:
Well, I think one of the focus the board has had and had for a couple of years is that our market is growing geographically. And sometimes we talk about you've got to drive to, you could afford. But there's also as our market expands and as these highways expand and this job, you know, as these creations come a little bit farther away, we still have people who want to live in the, in the core of the triangle, but also sometimes now they want to live a little farther out. And we're making, trying to make sure our mls can best serve the consumer and in turn best serve the agent. And great examples of that is going to be where we did the data share with Longleaf and that fable market. We realized that we had an overlapping market there and we needed to get where an agent did not have to be a member of two different MLSs in order to see all the data in say Harnett or Lee county. It's kind of crazy that an agent has to pay two or three mlss for that. And I think part of our vision moving forward is how do we continue to grow that.

John Wood [00:14:32]:
In some cases it could be growth where dwarf MLS is the primary MLS in a marketplace, but it also could be. I mean we would all love to see Triad and Charlotte where that data is available to us within our MLS. Not necessarily so an agent will get in the car and drive 3 hours ago show a property in Charlotte, but so that if they have a consumer going there, a client moving there, they can better look to see and get a feel and their own feel of what that market is like with MLS data instead of having to go to a third party site that doesn't have all the details in it and doesn't have search quite the same way. You know, a lot of people misunderstand that. We are not advocates that you need to go and show property in Wilmington, Greensboro, Charlotte or wherever. But boy, it would be nice to have a better understanding of what those markets are like in the same format we're accustomed. Looking at our own market, I do hope that we will see some growth in some of the geographic area that we cover. But more importantly, I want to make sure we've got that growth in our data that we're providing to our subscribers.

Matt Fowler [00:15:35]:
Yeah, there's a couple of pieces and let's make sure everybody understands. Watching the podcast today, there's a couple of things driving that, right? So you guys have office affiliations in multiple cities in North Carolina and you have a website that has the listings on it. And my job, as I see it, is to try and make that easier for you and for the consumers coming to John.com, i don't know what that is. Coming to yourwebsite.com to look for properties, you know, the national sites and the resellers and people that, you know, aren't kind of farm to table close to the consumer like you are. Those sites have listings all over the country. And what I would like to do is to bring your site to the same sort of level so at least it has listings all over North Carolina or the area where your offices have affiliates. So that when somebody finds it, they're on your site because they trust you and they find the house. And if it's right over the line because of the way our networks work.

Matt Fowler [00:16:33]:
I would like them not to even have to think about that. They're on your site, they ask a question about that house. We know what to do with that. With the rules. We always honor the intellectual property rights of the brokers that give us data or license this data. So that's going to go to the, to the right person and that person can get an answer back in seconds if we set that up right. And that's very valuable. I think we're focused on the consumer and making sure that their experience when they touch us, as good as we can make it.

Matt Fowler [00:17:01]:
And on the back end, and I'll let you comment on that, we have the lockbox on the house and we have professionals that need to get into these properties. Some of them are right over the line and we're doing our very best to make sure that that's a smooth process and that access can be done without difficulty.

John Wood [00:17:17]:
Yeah, because there's no search engine out there that shows somebody where the MLS lines existed. And again, what we're hoping is that those lines are not just not visible to the consumer, but are not an obstacle. And right now, yes, if we were to go, and I'll use the example, if we're to go out to Nash county, to Rocky Mount, there is not a single MLS that has all of the data in that Nashville and Rocky Mount area. Some of it is in doorfast, some of it is in the Down east regional site. And would love to have that consumer looking in that market and to be able to go, hey, I like that list and that list and the agent to be able to have immediate access to all of that data. And that's the element that we're here to try to make sure the agents are the experts in the area and that some national portal is not the king of data, that the agent is a king of the data, and that they can take that and provide their client the best information possible and hopefully more details than will be available on some national portal.

Matt Fowler [00:18:20]:
Yeah, exactly. It is that I said from the table, I want people to think of it that way, like we know more about it than they're going to do because they pulled our data. That's where they get the data is from us and then they translate it, however they translate it and you end up with what you end up with. But John and his colleagues, our other directors are out there meeting with sellers and their own markets and we're acting on the ground another area. You said 30 something years, John. Right.

John Wood [00:18:45]:
Yeah. So Matt, that's one thing that a lot of the subscribers don't realize is that over half of the Doorify MLS board of directors are boots on the ground, agents that do not have management responsibilities at all. They are there working with consumers every day and night, seven days a week. And then the balance of us that are in some levels of management, we also are doing some transactions, but also we're spending a lot of time with our agents and therefore we see where the challenges are. We also see where the opportunities are, and we're trying to take that to the boardroom to find out how we can be better. And I look forward to 2025 of helping everyone see the vision that we've all had for the last 24 to 36 months be a reality. And we can leave behind what our challenges have been and look forward to a better day and much better tools than we had two years ago.

Matt Fowler [00:19:39]:
Yeah, for sure. Thanks for saying that, John, and thanks for the support. I think that we are on a track to prove that we have built the best MLS infrastructure in the country. We have work to do. We are investing in our member services department and our data accuracy and completeness in the speed of our data next year and our subscribers. Thanks for watching today, and you'll see more about all of that coming soon on the dashboard, which will include more meet board interviews like this one with John Wood. John, thank you for joining us today.

John Wood [00:20:12]:
Thank you, Matt. It's been a pleasure.

Matt Fowler [00:20:14]:
I'll see you next time.

John Wood [00:20:15]:
All right.