Keith Garner uses technology to help Realtors with day-to-day business

BrokerIPTV: We are at Inman Connect San Francisco 2008. I am with Keith Garner and Keith is with the National Association of Realtors and welcome Keith.

Keith Garner: Yes. Thank you for having me.

BrokerIPTV: Maybe you could go over real quickly the difference between say NAR and realtor.com and move.com and homestore and you got any other brands we need to know about?

Keith Garner: Well, let's see. Homestore turned into move.com; it kind of evolved like a Pokemon. It just... one day just changed, but now realtor.com is owned by NAR and it is run on our behalf by move.com. You know they are a dot com focused on making this national listing portal and it has been a great partnership between both of our groups to provide a service for our members and it has been good. I mean unfortunately I don't know a lot about the day-to-day operations because that is outside it. You know I focus really on directly on our members and how our members work as part of the Center for Realtor Technology.

BrokerIPTV: What is your position with NAR then?

Keith Garner: I am the Managing Director for the Center for Realtor Technology. So, I run a department that is more or less an R&D kind of department for the industry. So, we look at... as opposed to like our IT department, our IT department keeps the association running, what I do and my department does is we look at how our members do their business and how we can educate our members and how we can bring interesting open source projects to help them on a day-to-day basis.

BrokerIPTV: I think what I am starting to see just from the conversation is the agenda is management... very sophisticated management of your social media.

Keith Garner: And I think... well, I think that is starting to happen... that is happening by pressure outside of our market because everyone is starting to have that problem. You know Facebook, MySpace, Linkedin, Twitter, how many sites do I have to visit everyday to do anything? So, people are starting to use sites that either aggregate all those together like Friendster or [Inaudible] or some of the other ones.

BrokerIPTV: Tube Mogul... Tube Mogul is a good one. You know about Tube Mogul, right?

Keith Garner: Sure, yeah.

BrokerIPTV: [laughs]

Keith Garner: Not want [Inaudible] everyday unfortunately, but...

BrokerIPTV: Well, hey, we really appreciate your time Keith. Good to see you here again. I think the first time we interviewed you was up at the... couple of years ago at the NAR bloggers lounge, right?

Keith Garner: Yeah. Yeah, that was it and yeah, we will be doing that again. That seems to be every year, get more crowded and more crowded and in... at annual last year, it seemed like the place to meet and hopefully, this year we are going to be better located. We actually fought to be closer to the expo floor where more of the bloggers will actually be and we will be able to you know probably still be a good meeting center and everything.

BrokerIPTV: How about some big bandwidth for God's sakes?

Keith Garner: Yeah, we are working on that too. Part of it's up to the venue, but we are trying. We are trying.

BrokerIPTV: You know bandwidth, we've got all these Web 2.0 things, all these Internet things, bandwidth is terrible.

Keith Garner: The only other thing is at a place like you know where this conference is in the Palace, you are kind of stuck with the whim of what the hotel provides. The hotels haven't caught up to the conferences. So, conferences need to turn around and scream. So....

BrokerIPTV: Well, thanks Keith. Appreciate it.

Keith Garner: No problem.

Posted on October 12, 2008 11:47:14 by Blog Author