The Power of Alignment

​Today, we officially announced our partnership with CoreLogic replacing RPR as our vendor. We are excited to make this announcement and about the future of this initiative. We've been working closely with CoreLogic for almost six months to ensure everyone is aligned on Upstream's promise to the brokers—a promise to provide brokers with better tools to exercise their fiduciary duty to protect and control their firm and client's data.

Navigating Upstream through industry waters has sometimes felt like Class V rapids as we learn and maneuver to reach our goal. The greatest lesson throughout this journey is the need for alignment: alignment of stakeholders, alignment of mission and alignment of incentives.

"We are very excited about our partnership with CoreLogic. Their team has demonstrated an understanding of our needs, a willingness to work through the complexities, has deep relationships with MLSs and brokers across the country, and a track record to get the job done," says Real Estate One CEO and UpstreamRE Chairman Dan Elsea. "They collaborated early on to ensure all parties were appropriately set up and aligned to succeed."

So, what's different with this new deal? Let's start with what's the same.

Brokers remain in charge of the initiative with its board and operating agreement unchanged, maintaining its "cooperative style" operating structure. The Board of Managers remains elected by the Upstream members to manage and direct the initiative. And Upstream will continue to drive the product roadmap, marketing, sales, and governance, and quoted prices will not be increased.

Why is this better? What propels Upstream's future?

CoreLogic has outstanding experience, relationships, and coverage across the MLS community. They are the perfect choice if you want to align better with any MLS. Upstream has always looked to partner with the MLS community, but we are better with CoreLogic by our side. Their platforms already cover over 60 percent of the US, and they adroitly understand regional nuances and issues MLS CEOs face. With the Trestle platform, we can create a custom product for brokers that leverage their enterprise infrastructure and integration architecture. Over 300 vendors are already integrated and receive data today!

Finally, CoreLogic embraces our desire to align, adopt, and promote the RESO standard. Few vendors have the resources and broad coverage we can leverage to help push national adoption.

So, what's next?

The teams have been working together on an aggressive, multi-phased roll-out. Brokers will receive deployments as early as Q2 that give them syndication control and administrative accounts. Shortly after, users can "enhance" listings with high-res photos, documents, etc. And they'll receive vendor management and distribution reporting. We will follow with role-based accounts, roster management (agent, staff, team, and office) and team features. All this in 2019!

We'll end the year building Add/Edit functionality looking to deploy in the first half of 2020. Innovation won't end there as we plan to add client record management, transaction fields and even add customizable broker fields to their managed data in subsequent phases.

Proper alignment early has created powerful, internal momentum. There is a lot to be excited about in this new partnership. We added experts who have navigated these waters to our team.
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To view the original article, visit the Upstream blog.