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TRANSCRIPT:

Hi, everybody. Welcome to brokerage insider the podcast where we interviewed the leaders in real estate and technology. I'm your host, Eric Stegemann. I'm the CEO of TRIBUS, one of the largest independent prop tech companies in the real estate space and provider of custom brokerage technology to medium and large brokerages in the United States, Canada, and even around the world.

Now, in addition, I'm also the managing partner, TRIBUS capital, a private equity fund, focused on the prop tech. On today's episode, we have art Carter. Now art is the CEO of CRMLS. It's one of the largest MLSs in the country, and I'm really excited to dig in with him on a slew of topics today. Art, thanks for joining.

Thank you for having me, Eric. Now I ask all my guests, you know, tell us a little bit about how you got to where you're at now. First of all, how did you get into real estate to begin with? So I've been working a couple of private and publicly held companies really on, you know, the technology and, and accounting actually fronts and had done some consultants.

Especially on the technology side for a smaller mid-sized companies. And it was really looking for a, a new challenge and found a, a position with a local association in 1997, I believe it was. And from there kind of transitioned to where I'm at right now which is CRMLS which was at the time that I started in 2005 was MLSMLS. And we have grown from an organization servicing about 20,000 brokers, agents, appraisers to about 110,000 today. So a lot of growth, a lot of expansion, a lot of changes. And my job today is vastly different than it was when I first started. And I'm the type of person who loves a challenge. So it is kind of right up my right up my alley and.

Well, so obviously being, being in charge of a, a, of an MLS has all sorts of of great pieces, but also probably some, some frustrating things that you deal with on a daily basis. So what's the, what's the the big kind of things are the things you're seeing right now, or that the MLS is dealing with that are maybe challenges that you're working.

Well, in all honesty, the, the legal environment that we're facing some of the the legal environment and the, the restrictions that some of the things that are going on legally are, are placing on us as, as multiple listing services. That is a challenge. I think that, you know, we're really trying to.

To accomplish moving in, in real time with the marketplace and providing brokers and agents with real value. And it's always difficult, especially when it comes to a policy standpoint and a rule standpoint, I think a lot of times, not so much necessarily at the brokerage level, but at the agent level, there is not a lot of education that is being done as to what the multiple listing service.

What it does, what some of its requirements are, why those requirements are there. So that's always a difficulty that we face is that educational piece and throw COVID into that and our inability to get in front of people, you know, as effectively. Zoom's great. But. I'm a firm believer. Real estate is about relationships and most of those relationships are built face-to-face and, you know, sometimes one-on-one even, and COVID really, really put a Kirk in our ability to do some of the things that I really think that we needed to do to keep, you know, our brokerages and our agents kind of in the same ballpark as what it is that that is going on in the industry.

Our difficulty always lies in the fact that there's such a high turnover amongst our members. And when I go out and speak, it's not all that surprising when I ask people, how, how many of you have been are newer into the business and have been in the business for less than seven years to have 50% of the...