EDR’s CEO brings his unique perspective to address topics of strategic interest, including the state of the ESA industry, business management issues, trends in information technology and global developments affecting environmental due diligence practices.
CEO Exchange
7/18/2008 | posted by
rbarber
Next week I'm off to Colorado to attend the RISMedia CEO Exchange. This will be the third year of the event which brings together 100 CEO's from the residential real estate industry to discuss the latest issues. Invitees include the heads of the country's largest brokerages, MLS' and technology providers.
Given the current state of the market, I'm sure it will be a lively event. Talk about an industry in a major state of disruption. For starters, transactions are way dow ...
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I just finished reading a research study of legal professionals that arrived at two basic conclusions which, as a member of Commonground, I found very encouraging. This study was commissioned by LexisNexis and focused on legal professionals and their attitutues, views and opinions regarding social networks.
The first conclusion was that they're already doing it. More than half of all attorneys are already members of online social networks. Furthermore, as ...
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Last week I was on a phone call with a customer who asked "where does Commonground go from here?". This is a really great question so I thought I'd throw some ideas out for the entire community to comment on. But first, a quick recap of where Commonground is right now.
Since being launched, over 1,200 people have registered in Commonground. The most exciting thing about this to me is that there has been absolutely zero marketing or promotion yet ...
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For all of this blog's regular readers, including those who attended the Scottsdale conference two weeks ago, it is no secret that there has been a lot of recent attention paid to the concept of user generated environmental content and how (or even "if") it should be considered within a Phase 1. The basic arguement goes like this: "As an EP, how can I rely on user generated content when I don't know anything about its contributor or its accuracy? Aren't ...
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Recently there's been a lot of chatter about how our industry would deal with a database of user generated content about properties so I thought I'd try to get a discussion going around the topic. First, allow me to define what the concept is and is not.
Essentially the idea would be to create a second "copy" of the database and then allow the community to make edits to the copy. Edits might be things like adding additional information about a property, uploading ...
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Wow! It's only been a few weeks now since the launch of the commonground community and my how rapidly things are moving. Yesterday the community exceeded 900 members, still mainly environmental consultants, and we haven't even begun yet to reach out to other due diligence professionals! While I hate making predictions since I'm often wrong (there was no way the Patriots could have lost the last Superbowl), I am hoping to see this community surpass 2,000 members w ...
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If you are reading this, then you've probably figured out that our industry now has its own social networking site; CommonGround. CommonGround was built to become THE global community for property due diligence professionals and my hope is that this goal will be reached as rapidly as possible. What makes CommonGround different from other social networks is its exclusive dedication to the property due diligence industry.
Most of us are aware of the successes that MySp ...
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Last summer I made a blog post in which I stated that there were three (3) pillars to EDR's business strategy. These pillars are content, workflow solutions and community. Nearly everything we do at EDR should create value in one of these three areas or else it's probably not worth doing.
Since then, much of the news coming out of EDR has been about workflow solutions (EDR OnDemand, PARCEL, Vapor Intrusion Screen) and community (CommonGround) while content has&n ...
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For three days this week, some colleagues and I attended the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) Summit in New York. The event pulled together a broad range of business executives from both the content world and the software world to discuss emerging trends and the rapid rate of change that the internet has brought upon all of us.
For me, the best part of the conference was seeing firsthand that the things EDR is dealing with are the same things that all other content compa ...
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It has now been nearly five full months since this blog's inception and during this time I have made fourteen entries. Three of these entries included my comments and thoughts regarding the state of the ESA industry; an industry that has clearly been directly impacted by the credit crunch. Now that the calendar fourth quarter has concluded and the numbers are in, I thought I would share what EDR is seeing in the U.S. due diligence market.
First and foremost, transactions are down. After showi ...
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