Thanks,

Mack – No apologies. I appreciate it! I may be taking you up on your offer.

Don – SDAR (or your association) is the contact. I am writing a position paper in case you would like to email me with your comments.

Kris, my apologies for a long-winded post. I had a lot to get off my chest on the SANDICOR subject. If you are interested in further explanation feel free to email me.

K.M. “Mack” McMillan – VP
The Brokers Edge, Inc.

Just a quick note, and then perhaps later (in your spare time!!) you can respond.

We had a Sandicor rep at our office two days ago. She indicated the only way to get changes was through NSDCAR or SDAR. Will you let all of us know after your meeting who we can turn to, how the process will work, so that we can stop finger pointing and start solving this mess?

Thanks so much for all you do!

I am attending a meeting this morning with other SDAR agents who have been asked to provide comments on the new system and the lingering bugs. Should be a long morning.

As for blame for this debacle there is plenty to go around. The transition from the IDX format to RETS was a train wreck by any reasonable person’s point of view.

In defense of our competitor, Diverse Solutions, SANDICOR was less than responsive to programmers taking weeks to answer emails, return calls or even give proper login credentials to the data. And Justin was being kind when he described the data server as “unstable”.

The client server application furnished by Marketlinx was quirky and of little use not to mention the fact that it only works on Windows. And VieleRETS was unable to maintain a connection to the data server without some serious recoding and writing a custom interface. In short due to non compliance data retrieval was very difficult.

I guess someone forgot to mention to Marketlinx that the rationale behind RETS was to standardize language used by the programmers. You would also think that any company trading stock publicly would know that there are other OS besides Windows.

Our San Diego clients were extremely upset with SANDICOR for turning off the IDX feed BEFORE all the bugs in the new system were worked out. One has to wonder why the rush to turn off the IDX feed and why it was not left on for a few more weeks. What would it have hurt to have both feeds? It would have made a lot more sense for SANDICOR to furnish csv mapping to their IDX Vendors matching their original format and continue the IDX feed during a transition period.

The situation was even more tedious with our system inasmuch as we have a far larger backend (Client Resource Manager) for lead management than most systems offer. So in addition to doing all the normal front end stuff that you see on the MLS we had a full import of existing leads, notes, calendars, appointments and Virtual Floor Duty Calendars and so on. Needless to say it made for an extremely long weekend.

My greatest fear is that with the approaching deadline for the mandate by NAR that all MLS offer RETS we will see more Boards replicate the mistakes made by SANDICOR in their haste for compliance. Much like taxes we tend to put things of this nature off till the last minute and then rush (fumble) through it to beat the deadline.

While RETS is not new there is very little documentation currently available for REALTORS® or Vendors to assist in transitioning from IDX to RETS.

The good news is that the worst should be behind us all and hopefully some valuable lessons were learned. The bad news is that an industry that already suffers from credibility issues and that is currently in a slump just took another hit unnecessarily.

K.M. “Mack” McMillan – VP
The Brokers Edge, Inc.

Not surprising. I just ran a CMA for a seller, and the information is so jumbled, unreliable, and visibly wrong in many cases, I am embarrassed to give it to him. Every day brings a new challenge and a new bug uncovered plus many, many white screens of death. Urrrr.

New listings are online again. How is this for dumb on the IDX front: a programmer can write a query asking for all of the listings without the sold status and they get about 4,000. Then ask for all the listings that are active and they get around 19,000. Bizarre!