Smarter Agent Now a Vendor in 370 MLSs
Smarter Agent has some of the leading brokers and agents in the United States as its customers. This has led us to the fastest IDX rollout in the history of the US, putting us live now in over 370 MLSs nationwide.
It has also given us an insider’s view on a few things: like which MLS software providers have the best data for consumers and professionals or who has secure MLS data products versus those with weaker offerings. As the expression goes sometimes no news is good news. We spend a tremendous amount of time meeting IDX rules in place and strive to have great relationships each MLS we work with which in many ways creates no news.
NEW PRODUCTS JUST FOR THE MLS
Based on our MLS expertise, we have started offering products just for MLSs, and it has become one of our fastest growing product lines. With MRIS, for example, we are creating the first dual-purpose mobile app, with a consumer and a professional side. To read MRIS’s press release click here.
NEW DATA GURU
To help us stay ahead of the data game and allow us to continue to develop and enhance our products, we have brought in a new SVP of Engineering, David Willen. David was previously the CTO of Barnes and Nobile.com where he handled millions of books and transactions, now he is handling millions of homes.
THE CHALLENGE and SOLUTION
In 2012 our biggest challenge has been maintaining our MLS data. Did you know EVERY single day somewhere in America, an MLS is changing their data fields around! As you can imagine this is an unbelievably difficult task to manage on a MLS by MLS basis in 370 MLSs, and yet still have to maintain and power thousands of apps in the marketplace all conforming to unique MLS rules! We recently had to beef up our team and work with some data provisioners just to keep on top of this.
I think something that would be great for the industry and certainly would make it more efficient for us is if every MLS or even the big MLS software vendors would upgrade just 4 times a year, or even better go to a single standard like RESO. In the end there would be so much better products out there if we didn’t have to spend so much time and money dealing with hundreds of different data feeds that can change on a daily basis.
~ Brad Blumberg, CEO