Hyperledger > Case Studies > How the National Association of REALTORS® Improved Member Services with Hyperledger Fabric

How the National Association of REALTORS® Improved Member Services with Hyperledger Fabric

Customer Company Size

Large Corporate

Region

America

Country

United States

Product

Hyperledger Fabric

Tech Stack

Blockchain
Distributed Ledger Technology

Implementation Scale

Enterprise-wide Deployment

Impact Metrics

Productivity Improvements
Digital Expertise

Technology Category

Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Blockchain

Applicable Functions

Business Operation

Use Cases

Asset Lifecycle Management

Services

Data Science Services
System Integration

About The Customer

The National Association of REALTORS® (NAR) is America’s largest trade association, representing 1.3 million members involved in all aspects of the residential and commercial real estate transactions. Members belong to one or more of approximately 1,200 local associations/boards and 54 state and territory associations of realtors. All of these organizations are independent, even though they work together. The various local and state associations are independent corporations working together to deliver programs under a Code of Ethics that is over a hundred years old. There is an existing centralized database containing members’ billing information. Engagement information such as volunteerism, professional development and committee service is not shared.

The Challenge

The National Association of REALTORS® (NAR) is America’s largest trade association, representing 1.3 million members involved in all aspects of the residential and commercial real estate transactions. Members belong to one or more of approximately 1,200 local associations/boards and 54 state and territory associations of realtors. All of these organizations are independent, even though they work together. NAR was looking for ways to better serve their members and felt that analyzing members’ engagement would help them achieve this goal. Unfortunately, member engagement events were only available to the association where the event occurred. Getting over 1200 CEOs to agree to give up control of their data and processes by switching to one common database sounded unlikely.

The Solution

NAR used Hyperledger Fabric to build the REALTOR® Association Blockchain (nicknamed BlockR), a blockchain-based tool for recording and sharing information about member engagement across the nation’s realtor associations. Hyperledger Fabric is a blockchain framework implementation and one of the Hyperledger projects hosted by The Linux Foundation. Intended as a foundation for developing applications or solutions with a modular architecture, Hyperledger Fabric allows components, such as consensus and membership services, to be plug-and-play. Hyperledger Fabric leverages container technology to host smart contracts called “chaincode” that comprise the application logic of the system. The team created the REALTOR® Association Blockchain (also known as BlockR), a blockchain-based tool for recording and sharing information about member engagement across the nation’s realtor associations.

Operational Impact

Searching for member engagement now takes seconds, where it used to take hours of emails and phone calls.
The pilot was developed by six associations and included contributed data from an additional four associations.
In the week following the presentation of the pilot in March 2018, 51 associations asked to be part of it.

Quantitative Benefit