Heading to NAR San Francisco: 3 things to know

These three things should help make NAR San Francisco a much better experience:

1. NAR Conference scheduling tool

The NAR conference schedule features more than 100 sessions. So how do you decide what to attend? At the NAR website, there is an online scheduling tool that lets you cut through the clutter by filtering by the audience and topic.

For example, if you are a broker-owner attending NAR and your focus this year is on technology, in the pull-down menu, you can select "Broker/Owners/Managers" as the Target Audience and then "Business Technology & Innovation." If you are more interested in Broker Management topics, select that from the Target Category pulldown, and hit submit.

The NAR scheduling engine automatically creates a list of recommended sessions – a complete schedule for every day of NAR Annual with the time, topic, and a link to the full details of each recommended meeting.

2. NAR Bus Schedule

Sadly, the streets of San Francisco are not only challenging because of the steep hills and because of a severe homeless problem. NAR has a webpage with information about getting to the new Moscone Center here, including bus shuttle times, followed by a list of hotels and the route numbers for each.

Shuttle buses will scurry you between key hotel locations—all accessible to the major NAR hotels—and take you to the new Moscone Center.

The Moscone Center has been completely rebuilt and is now multi-story with three major wings: North, South, and West. NAR also is providing a downloadable "safe walking route" in a PDF here (but I could not get it to work).

Here's a link to the NAR Hotel Map (PDF).

3. The NAR Annual App

Every year, it seems mobile apps for conferences overall get better, more useful. That's certainly the case with this year's NAR Annual mobile app. It is easier than ever to find the booth number of exhibitors in the Expo.

Exhibiting firms are sorted by categories from 1031 Tax Deferred Exchanges and Accounting to VR, Warranties, and Yard Signs. Or you can do a quick search by name, but that's not quite as efficient, often yielding more results than you need.

The app allows you to create a personal schedule, so you won't try to attend two conferences set for the same time. You can easily find info on the speakers, all at a push of a button. It even allows you to favorite items so you can find them later under the "Heart" on the bottom of the app's screen to quickly pull up those "can't miss" sessions.

It is available in the Apple App Store here and Google Play here.

I will recap my personal highlights and favorite takeaways from NAR, so if there is something I should put on my radar, send an email to [email protected].