Firelands Association of Realtors®

2710 Campbell Street ~  Sandusky, Ohio 44870

Phone 419.625.5787 | 419.625.3802 | Fax 419.625.3442

www.firelandsmls.com | www.faor.com

Sara Riesen, President 2016 David W. Freitag, RCE, CEO

As part of our MLS continued efforts to ensure the security and relevance of your listings information the Board of Directors voted to institute a new policy in regards to RETS/IDX feed set up and annual maintenance.  This change will be two fold; first we will require a charge of $50 for any new RETS/IDX feeds; Second there will be an annual maintenance and review of all your office feeds that for a total annual $100 total fee.  Any IDX feeds that go through the Listings Syndication Manager are at no charge to the office and will not be required to be reported on this form.

The Board felt strongly that the fee structure would be held to a minimum and the amount is an attempt to help absorb some of the actual cost required to set up and maintain these feeds.  When filling out your annual form, please take time to ensure that all outgoing feeds are still attached to an actual vendor that you are still doing business with.

Again, thank you for your understanding.  Our main goal is to ensure that the MLS provides relevant, fresh, clean and safe data.  As technology continues to evolve we are working hard to ensure that our data remains accurate and safe.  Your cooperation and membership is greatly appreciated.

CEO Report to Board

The New Year has arrived and we have been busy with planning the calendar of events for 2016. President Sara has I have already started to visit our member's offices and we plan on taking 2 days each month on these visits. Our first visits were in Tiffin and we plan on moving to Fremont next. We also are planning on visiting affiliate member's locations this year.
Our Christmas party at Camden Falls was a great success. The attendance was over 100 and we were able to see members who have not attended the party in the past. The party for this year is going to be held at the Port Clinton Yacht Club.

The OAR winter conference was held from January 16th – 19th at the Easton Hilton. We had 8 members in attendance along with me and our Attorney. This year I am serving as the Chairman of the OAR Association Executives committee. As chairman I requested that our attorney handle the education program at this meeting. D.J. prepared a class on professional standards and it was very well received. I have had many compliments on his program, and I thank him for his hard work on this class.

For 2016 the focus is still on NAR Core Standards and raising the professional standards of our members. At OAR there was a mock commission dispute, and a mock Real Estate Commission hearing with the entire Ohio Commission present. I am happy to report that our Professional Standards process is one of the best in the State.
The AE committee also had a presentation form REALTOR.com on agent rankings and reviews. All brokers need to make sure that their agents sign in to claim and update their profile data. This profile is a no cost to our members, and should be encouraged by all Brokers. This will be a focus of advertising for 2016 from REALTOR.com this year.
There is a task force working at OAR on reducing the amount of State meetings down to two. The idea is to do away with the January meeting and to add time to the April legislative meetings and the Convention.

In other news, we received word from IRS that our Foundation has been granted tax exempt status. The next step is for the Directors to establish a board to oversee this endeavor. This was a long process to get to this point and now we should be ready to take advantage of additional donation possibilities.

We finished 2015 with a profit before depreciation and we were just over our budgeted revenue. We have already collected receivables from our members from unpaid 2015 items, and we have reduced our overall past due accounts.

Many of our Committees have not yet met, and our annual planning workshop will be held after the Directors meeting on the 21st of January. The goal of this day is to set goals for the committees to work on this year.

Respectfully submitted,

David W Freitag RCE, CEO