Open Standards Consortium for Real Estate's Andy Fuhrman

Andy Fuhrman has spent years promoting national and international standards for the commercial real estate industry. But even Fuhrman, the San Francisco-based CEO of the Washington, DC-based Open Standards Consortium for Real Estate (OSCRE), was surprised to discover the real-life standards were making their way into virtual worlds. “I was contacted by someone who wanted to use the OSCRE standards in Second Life,” he recalls, referencing the prominent virtual world launched by Linden Research Inc. five years ago. From Aug. 2006 to April 2007, statistics show Second Life’s population swelled from less than 100,000 to more than six million.

A downloadable program allows Second Life participants, called “residents”, to interact with each other through motional avatars or computer generated virtual representations. Residents can explore, meet other Residents, socialize, participate in individual and group activities, create and trade services and even buy virtual property. “I was told participants wanted to use our lease abstract, space classifications and information exchange standards to track property in virtual worlds,” he continues. “It just about blew the top of my head off.”

But he didn’t say no. Standards enable real estate professionals to speak the same language, from country to country or from one world to another. They’re a good thing, Fuhrman says, especially at a time when the line between virtual and real is increasingly blurred. For Fuhrman, the convergence of the tangible and the intangible is both exciting and challenging. Here’s what he had to say about standards, reality and the state of the real estate industry.