User Group Report & Future MLS System Upgrades

I attended our MLS vendor’s User Group meeting on June 22 through June 25 in Overland Park, Kansas. Our vendor Fidelity MLS Solutions is now known as LPS Real Estate Group. The new company will not affect our service as the company transition has already occurred seamlessly. What this means to us, according to Rich Lull, Senior Vice-President MLS Solutions, that more services will become available to the MLS. The new company has greater financial resources earmarked for MLS enhancements and services and is committed to do so.

The user group meetings were attended by over 120 MLS executives and staff from throughout the country. I have had an opportunity to speak with and compare notes with MLS executives from California, Montana, Nevada, Wisconsin, Hawaii, Mississippi, South Carolina, Illinois and others.

In addition to the training sessions I attended, I had a special closed meeting with Rob Overman, Chief Technology Officer and Vice-President of New Technology, Kevin Mastin, Senior System Support Manager, Jerry Bogart, System Support Manager and John Mitchelson, Director of Customer Care. Our MLS platform Paragon XL is unique in that it is an open sourced as opposed to closed source platform of Paragon 3 or 4, which are also LPS Real Estate Group products. With that said, the benefit we have is the opportunity to enhance and modify our platform on the fly without having to wait for global system changes.

Below are some enhancements that will be deployed to our system in the near future and some that are scheduled for later release.

The system is now Internet Explorer 8 compatible

Listing photos entered will be processed with an algorithm that will minimize the wavy lines that occur on homes with vinyl siding due to image size compression.

Cross Browser compatibility – the system will be accessible using Firefox, Mozilla or MAC (this is big for many of you).

New graphical Statistical Reports and Hit Count reports

More functionality of mobile access to MHMLS to permit more drop down selections for searching and some status changes to your listings (such as price changes) from your PDA from anywhere.

IDX Framing Solution – In lieu of having to develop a search engine to display MLS listings on you web site all you will have to do is add the framing solution link to your page.

A change to the desktop to display the agent photo and agent contact info as entered in User Preferences and a link to the MHMLS Blog.

CMA Enhancements – The CMA will be upgraded and will permit the option of entering a price range or specific suggested selling price. Also there will be an option to save it as a PDF file.

Listing Load off line through an editable PDF form

Enhancing the Spreadsheet Grid Report to be exportable

ALL of these enhancements are scheduled to be deployed between now and year’s end. I will continue to bring you up to speed as developments unfold.