Michael Wurzer That’s a question I heard a lot this week following our upgrade. Implicit in the question was frustration the user was experiencing shifting from what they knew with the old system to the new one. One of the primary purposes of the upgrade was to give our clients the ability to deliver high-end content to their clients, like interactive maps, big photos, videos, and rich data, like this:
All of this raises an interesting question. Can an important piece of business software like an MLS system serve both consumers and agents? Can these two worlds merge together into one? Or are they forever to be separated, with distinct purposes? Our belief is that the two can, and indeed must, merge.
Of course, the private side of an MLS system has to meet the needs of an agent and those needs are, at times, different from what a consumer wants or needs to see. The agent uses the system every day, and it needs to respond to those needs. But, in the end, the MLS system is only for agents only if agents are the ones buying and selling the property. If not, then the system most definitely is there to serve consumers, whether the agent is the intermediary or not, because, in the end, the consumers are the ones doing the buying and selling.