You may have heard about our upcoming release of the Next Generation REALTOR® Party Plus Membership Dashboard 3.0 on April 15th. Now meet the developer behind the REAL Strategies dashboards, Nathaniel Schwamm.

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Where did you grow up and go to college?

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NS: I grew up in NJ, but I ventured down to DC to go George Washington University, and I have not left!

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What is a unique thing about you?

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NS: I’m a big foodie, but (as might be on brand), I try to bring data into the fold. My first analytics job was working for a DC restaurant group and the first dashboard I ever built mapped DC’s food scene. If anyone ever had a question about which restaurant they should go to in DC, let me know!

 

What do you like best about the Dashboards?

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NS: So much data exists that people talk about zettabytes of global data (Yes, I needed to Google what that meant). At that scale, it’s so easy to get lost in data, but it’s also so hard to know where to start. Dashboards try to solve that problem at both ends. First, they centralize your data in one spot. For example, with the membership dashboard you don’t need to sift through 5 of 6 separate systems, because we try to bring together as many disparate data sets into a single spot. Building a dashboard also requires thinking about the steps to clean, standardize, and enhance the data which actually puts the data in a better shape to analyze.

 

Second, dashboards go further than a single visualization. As people around me know, I won’t shy away from running regressions or trying to calculate mixture distributions, but visualizations give a new perspective to break through noise. However, a static visualization just summarizes a single perspective; interactive dashboards harness the power of visualization on the fly – empowering users to create the solution that is most relevant at that point in time. And I won’t bore you with the neuropsychological research about how the human brain actually better understands interactive, visual presentation. It is always a big plus when clients let us know that they were able to do something in a few minutes that used to take them days or weeks, and it’s even cooler when we are told how the dashboards can do something that our clients didn’t even think was possible before.

 

Name two other things that you focus on at REAL Strategies besides the Dashboards?

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NS: I’m also part of the team that helps manage our data and technology offerings. Part of that is thinking about our wide range of solutions outside of the dashboards and what our clients need in the next weeks, months, and years ahead. That takes its form in dashboard (once 3.0 releases, we’ll start trying to think about 4.0), but it goes way further. One day that might mean I am focusing on our client portal, DASH, which is a good example of infrastructure that we’ve custom built from the ground up to maximize it’s potential for our clients.

 

Another day, I am thinking about how we can build new models that leverage advancements in machine learning. I also spend a lot of time talking to you all (and if we have not already had the opportunity to meet – we can set up a time!) because I fully believe that our offerings are only made better by understanding the cool things that you are working on and learning how we can help.

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If you want to work with Nathaniel and learn more about our RPP Dashboards, contact us at support@realstrategies.com.

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