Who are the 100 most influential in real estate? According to Inman News, our very own @Red_Allen is one of them! Well, his Twitter persona may be “Red,” but we call him Mark. We also call him a lot of other things not fit for print, but that’s neither here nor there.

Kidding. Kidding. We think highly of our CEO. “The Big Cheese in the Corner Office” is fair and honest and smooths the way for cool and useful work to be done in an industry that is often accused of being slow, unyielding and technologically tone deaf.

We are thrilled by his being on the list. And he is both honored and humbled by it, always following up any praise with a quick reminder that he is simply a representative for the volunteer leaders and staff that make up the Minneapolis Area Association of REALTORS® and 10K Research and Marketing.

You know you’re raising eyebrows when you get coverage in the local newspaper months before launching the product noted in the story. Either that or it was a slow news day.

Hey, we’ll take what we can get.

David Arbit and G. Sax were treated to some delicious food at True Thai in Seward as a means to get the lowdown on Infosparks (tricky reporter), Jeff got quoted over the phone and then we all posed for pretty pictures in the Minneapolis Area Association of REALTORS® conference room. Voila, story! Long-time Twin Cities real estate beat writer, Jim Buchta, put together the piece entitled “Putting real estate data in useful packages.”

It was another nice article about our company, our team and the products we care about making.

We believe in an organized housing market, accurate data and helping real estate professionals prepare consumers with the best information available to help transactions get done and communities to grow with confidence and optimism.

Too lofty a goal? We don’t think so, and our daily efforts (yes, we monitor the fort on weekends, too) should prove this to be true to any who work with us.

Even this propaganda blog post is made with love and appreciation for you, gentle reader.

We were lucky enough to get some press from the local newspaper. They took a pretty picture of us and talked about how we were taking the world of real estate by storm.

It was a good article that garnered us some attention, but we were most moved by the comments below the article. Star Tribune comments, like comments in many news sources that allow them, are among the worst bits of writing on the Internet, full of vitriol, politically-motivated outcry and occasional racism. But we wore this comment as a badge of honor:

“J Crew called. They want they’re (sic) clothes back. If these guys can provide insight as well as they strike a pose, they’ll be gonzo before any agent paying for MLS finishes this article.”

– jablumpkin, comment on startribune.com article “Making sense of numbers” by Kara McGuire, 2/8/2010