Name

Duke Lane

Company

Independent Technology Consultant

E-mail

Contact Duke Lane (Independent Technology Consultant)

Website

http://www.dukelane.com

Office Phone

(469) 293-6789

Cell Phone

(817) 938-5958

Fax

(972) 355-8257

About the Dukester:

Duke's background is in technology and real estate ... in that order. Born into the title search industry in New England (his father was a partner in White Brothers in New Haven and worked in the industry for 45 years, dragging his son - sometimes kicking and screaming! - into the business with him during and after college), his curiosity and rebellious nature found him poking into those newfangled Commodores, TRS-80s and IBM PCs with increasing intensity, ultimately landing a mile higher at the base of the Rocky Mountains. There, he studied for his real estate license, passed the exam, and promptly started selling computers to Realtors. Go figure.

The software business took Duke to Texas, where he rose to select prominence as the VP of North American Sales & Marketing of a software company most people have never heard of, and then became the Executive Director of the Windows & OS/2 Developers Association ... which you've probably also never heard of ... but IBM, Microsoft, Novell, Borland, Lotus and lots of companies you have heard of were part of it!

Then, OS/2 died, Duke became redundant, "overqualified" for all but the most menial jobs, and so he decided to take the Texas real estate exam (somehow, it's different "across the border!"). Back to school, pass another test and ... then he started showing Realtors how to use the computers that somebody else had sold them. TopProducer, MLS software, forms software, Notepad(!), Solitaire(!!), and of course networks and all of that good stuff. Did some of their marketing. Ended up doing a lot of the technology-marketing stuff they couldn't or wouldn't wrap their heads around, started doing most of what agents did for a living ... and realized he'd never actually activated his license in the intervening three or four years! D'oh!

So, Duke did what any sane computer geek who understood real estate would do: he started a virtual tour company! That was in the halcyon days before iPix and cheap ($99) tours ... and continued well into the days when cheap ($30/mo) tours became commonplace. He learned a lot more about MLS systems, and IDX rules in particular, and became a thorn in associations' sides when he ranted and raved about making their VTs on MLS IDX-compliant so the rules could eventually be modified to require other sites to take the VT link for free and post them on their sites, rather than requiring the agents to pay to belong to each of them!

Not being dummies, agents quickly realized that Duke was only trying to sell more virtual tours and only trying to make it look like a "benefit" to them, so as revenues went down (try to compete with $30/month at $3.00 a gallon in Texas!), he did it again: went to real estate school, passed the exam ... and started selling technology to brokers!

So, here he is, on a real estate blog site, hoping and praying that he doesn't come across like a doggoned sales guy only interested in hawking his wares to the unwary and unsuspecting, and thinking that perhaps he might actually make a contribution somewhere along the line. After all, while he's "participated" in selling homes, he's never actually sold one himself, and as the old saying goes: "those that can, do; those that can't, teach!"

So, if you still haven't mastered Notepad and Solitaire, trust that Duke is just the guy to help! No charge in most cases. (But remember: that's Just Brakes' motto, too! "In most cases." Yours ain't one of 'em!)

So what's he do now? What makes him so special?

Glad you asked! First, you have to remember that Duke went to a special school and got a special education, so if he was never a special person before, he's a special person now!*

When he made his last attempted sabbatical from technology (with dreams of grandeur as a commercial dirt guy), he got pulled aside and told about this cool idea of turning listing data into videos - slideshows to some, but video format nonetheless - with spoken English voiceovers describing the major features of each listing, he was hooked. All it required was the MLSes agreeing that presenting the same data a different way was not "modifying" it — an IDX no-no — and that it was okay for brokers to display the result on their property-search pages.

Out of nearly 950 MLSes around the country, only one said no. But when the company he worked for started to read 950 sets of rules (okay: more like 400 since some use others'), they said "no!"

Testimonials

Do you have any good testimonials that clients have provided you in the past? Be sure to add them here.