With ARMLS going live today, we’re experiencing a heavy load and reconfiguring the web farm a bit to adjust to it. Sorry for the sporadic experience. We expect to have it smoothed out in the next few hours.
Unofficially (the official word belongs to ARMLS), Russell Shaw had the first new listing entered into the flexmls Web system that went live for ARMLS today. I was checking out Russell’s listing when I came across this picture and thought it was perfect for so many reasons.
Russell made his mark with the first listing (actually, he had the first six!) and it’s a huge relief to me and everyone here at FBS to finally be going live. We’ve been working on this for months and, as with any big project, there comes a point where it just has to be finished. I’m certain we’ll have a flurry of activity on the support lines over the next several weeks as the ARMLS membership becomes accustomed to the new system, but it will be so much better to work with customers on a live system instead of beta.
I changed my mind about Inman. I was pretty excited to go but there’s just too much going on around here to head out to San Francisco for four days. I really want to try to attend the meetings of the Minnesota MLSs discussing data sharing this week in St. Cloud and there’s a ton of stuff going on around the office for the final week before the ARMLS go live on July 28. Generally, I can work from anywhere but I can’t be in two places at once and the more interesting work is here, so that’s where I’ll be this week.
I finally made my flight reservation for Inman. I decided to go mostly to meet up with some important people and hopefully meet in person some others I’ve gotten to know on-line. RE Bar Camp and Bloggers Connect should be good for the meet ups, but I suspect the after-parties will be better. If you’re going to Inman and want to get together, let me know.
Our MLS software currently processes hundreds of thousands of searches every day to send out updates regarding new and changed listings for agents to consumers. This is an obviously valuable service from the agent and a core tool of the MLS system. However, we know a large number of these e-mail updates go unopened and are just hanging around consuming resources and sending out unwanted mail (i.e., spam). To address this, we’ve been thinking about the best way to purge the “dead wood” and so I thought I’d bounce some ideas around here and see what you all think is best.
1. Simple Expiration — One approach is to simply set an expiration date on every prospecting event and require the agent to renew the event at expiration. The advantage of this approach is that it’s clear and provides a regular reminder to the agents to review their prospects. The downside is that the agents may not want to conduct such a regular review and will see it as an unwanted hassle.
2. No Activity Expiration — We could expire an event if the links being sent haven’t been accessed by the recipient in a certain number of days (e.g., 30-60).
3. Combination — Another approach would be to combine the two and require an annual review/renewal of all links (whether accessed or not) and a shorter-term renewal (30-60 days) if the link hasn’t been accessed.
Vote for your choice below.
Best approach for expiring e-mail update events?
( polls)
A related question is how much advance notice of the expiration should be given to the agent? A week? Two weeks? More? Any other considerations I’ve missed?
The FBS Blog is back with comments. Thanks to Brandon for helping me get it figured out! If you desperately wanted to comment one of my riveting posts from the past few weeks, please go back and visit them:
No Time to Shower and Internet Leads for Real Estate
Roost: Peeling Back the Onion, A Marketing Platform for Brokers
Leads from Listings and Weeping for Buy-Side Brokers (or not)
You know you’re busy when you don’t have time to shower in the morning. That’s how it’s been for me lately, which explains why I haven’t been blogging. Anyway, I have been keeping up a bit with my reading and this post from Greg Sterling caught my attention with some interesting data from Yahoo! Real Estate and so I quote it here in full along with Mr. Sterling’s conclusion:
* Consumers spent an average of 12 hours online researching agents and 75% selected an agent within one week of starting their search
* Home buyers and sellers consider approximately two agents before making a final decision
* 74% of people who accessed an agent Web site got there with the help of a search engine
* 45% of respondents used the Internet to learn about agents they didn’t know existed
* 41% discovered special deals and promotions offered from an agent through the InternetThese data offer more confirmation of the Internet’s influence on consumer decision making. There’s no comparison with word of mouth, which probably accounts for the highest percentage of leads to realtors.
I upgraded WordPress last week and have had all sorts of fun ever since. New posts are automatically being flagged as not allowing comments, when the settings most definitely are set to allow them. Bugs. Also, I published the last post too early, just because I wasn’t yet used to the new interface. Anyway, my apologies to those who may want to comment. Hopefully I’ll find time to figure it out soon. In the meantime, if you’re desperate to comment, the posts earlier than the last two still allow comments.
The ground between portals and IDX is being defined in large part by Alex Chang from Roost. As a result, I was psyched Alex agreed to be a part of our panel on MLS portals. I had several take aways from Alex’s talk:
After the panel, I had many participants say how much they enjoyed Alex’s perspective, which was just enough outside the MLS perspective to be fresh and invigorating.
