Contact: Gregg Larson Clareity Consulting & Communications Phone: 480-368-8100 x201 Gregg.Larson@callclareity.com

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Clareity Consulting Leads Single Sign-On Initiative and New Real Estate Software Open Standards Work Group

January 30, 2006 (Scottsdale, AZ) – In December, 2005, Clareity Consulting organized and facilitated a one day MLS Vendor Technology Summit in Las Vegas. The attendees included CTOs and senior executives of many leading real estate and MLS software companies including FBS, Fidelity, First American (MarketLinx and Interealty at the time), Realigent, Stratus Data Systems, and Tarasoft. The group reviewed new MLS technologies, secure data distribution and tracking technologies, and "single sign-on." At this meeting, the vendor representatives suggested as a group that Clareity organize and facilitate a series of meetings in 2006 to firmly establish a new Real Estate Software Open Standards Work Group. The first two priorities for the work group are "single sign-on" and improved national real estate data standards.

"Single sign-on" refers to technologies that allow people using multiple applications to log in once for all applications, rather than logging into each one separately. This can be a great convenience, but vendors need to agree on standards so they can cooperate both efficiently and securely. In August 2005, Clareity published "The Convenience and Security of Single Sign-On" (http://www.callclareity.com/SingleSignOn.cfm) to educate the industry on existing secure open standards for single sign-on such as OASIS/SAML, Liberty Alliance, and WS Security. At the Technology Summit, the group unanimously agreed that "identity federation" technologies designed for corporate environments don’t make sense for the real estate industry or their specific applications. The group further agreed to use and promote the abovementioned open standards in the future, rather than using proprietary and unnecessarily expensive security solutions to realize the benefits of single sign-on. Since the meeting, a number of transaction management software vendors have also agreed to follow this path in cooperating with MLS and other software vendors.

"Utilizing secure open standards rather than proprietary vendor-based solutions for single sign-on will enable Fidelity to provide both convenience and security to users while not increasing costs," said Rob Overman, Vice President of MLS Technology at Fidelity MLS Systems & Solutions.

The second initiative is to further define improved national data standards. Data standards are important because they make it easier for different software systems to share information, reducing the extra effort, expense, and errors inherent in duplicate information entry. As the industry integrates software such as electronic forms, document management, and transaction management to pre-existing technologies such as MLS, CRM, and public records, the need for expansive data standards is increasing. While the vendors all appreciate and support the RETS standard, they felt as though more work could be done to move forward at a faster pace, in parallel to the RETS meetings, and especially between RETS meetings. The group asked Clareity to lead a data standards work group whose work product is intended to contribute to, extend, and complement the current RETS efforts. Clareity is also in discussion with several national real estate franchises regarding the data standards initiative. The franchises feel their franchisees can greatly benefit from this initiative and receive more accurate, standardized information for their back-office systems, as well as for their franchise reporting systems. Data standards will also create efficiencies and reduce the cost of data acquisition.

"RETS is the data standard for exchange of MLS data. Further definition of the standard fields will improve the ability of all MLS systems to meet the needs of brokers and agents across the country, particularly as more regionalization occurs. Clareity's current project with NCREX in northern California is an excellent example of evolving real-world data standards, and FBS is excited that Clareity is willing to facilitate this effort, and that we can all learn from the new NCREX data standards" said Michael Wurzer, CEO of FBS Data Systems.

Clareity is planning the next meeting of the Real Estate Software Open Standards Work Group on March 30th in Las Vegas to further these initiatives.

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