Does Your System Look Good?

WAV Group has been doing a lot of MLS and broker business solution RFPs recently—like 20 of them in the last three months. We used to do vendor selections the old fashioned way. We would develop a feature checklist and ask vendors to fill it out. Then we would look at the answers to discern what the answer means. Seeing a “Yes, we have it” will often mean that they can sort of do it, or that they do it but differently, or that they do it exactly the way it is expected.

We still have the 400-point checklist, but we try not to use it anymore unless the customer insists. Out pivot is to having a customer (MLS or broker) write down their story. The story is related to their company size, their culture, their competitors, and the features of operating their business that are most important in servicing customers, creating agent productivity, and being competitive.

Impressions mean more than anything else in vendor selections.

When you spend hours every day looking at technology solutions, you quickly learn that most of them are the same in terms of functionality. Sure, some companies have differentiators, but they are typically short term. But simply stated, most solutions offered to MLSs and brokerages today are ugly.

There has been a lot of advancement in front-end consumer facing applications. These are beautiful, responsive, user friendly, and delightful. Then the agent logs in and all of that is lost. The back office solution is ugly, unresponsive, cluttered, confusing, poorly organized, and gross. Log-in on a mobile device and the experience is horrid.

If you want to see a back office solution that is beautiful, check out MoPro. In my opinion, they have nailed it. Granted, they are tuned to support an agent website and are missing all of the required enterprise solutions that a broker would need. It’s not an MLS system, so it does not matter. IT IS BEAUTIFULLY DESIGNED AND PRESENTED!

I really wish that technology companies serving enterprise brokers or MLSs would take some time to redesign the workplace for agents.

Beyond beautiful, technology needs to work. Support should not be an issue. Support should only be a proxy for training touchups when people get stuck. Onboarding new users should be intuitive. Training should be omnipresent.

Lets do a better job. The first company that does this will rake in a lot of market share. Today’s MLS and broker selection process is largely a process of settling on what’s available rather than stepping up to innovation.