Back in March we distributed a 25 question member satisfaction survey to all active Broker Owners, Office Managers, Realtors, Assistants, and Appraisers from 24 of our 25 current client organizations. We offered surveys to 42,587 individual users via email and unique URLs,  published within the MLS. Responses were restricted by a combination of IP address and login credentials. No duplicate or falsified entries were received. A total of 1,295 responses, or 3.04% of the total, were received. The national average for similar customer satisfaction surveys with 12 to 25 questions is between 1 and 10%. We feel good about our response rate.

Based on all that, we can state the following with 99% confidence and a 3.53% margin of error:

94.05% of Solid Earth end users classify their overall satisfaction with the MLS system as positive.

• 85.41%: Excellent or Good knowledge of List-It’s search functionality.
• 71.04%: Excellent or Good knowledge of List-It’s inventory and maintenance.
• 54.13%: Excellent or Good knowledge of List-It’s CRM functionality.
• 55.13%: Excellent or Good knowledge of List-It’s statistics functionality.

• 58.07%: Respondents are Female. 

• 45.71%: Have been members of the MLS for more than 10 years.
• 60.54%: Use a version of Internet Explorer. (versions 7, 8, or 9)
• 16.45%: Using Apple browsers or devices.
• 16.5%  - Used Apple based browsers/devices to respond to the survey.
• 14.44%: Have been in the business for between 0 and 3 years.

• 72.04%: Listed Facebook as the most valuable social media outlet to share MLS information.
• 21.31%: Listed Google+ as the most valuable social media outlet to share MLS information.
• 17.73%: Listed Twitter as the most valuable social media outlet to share MLS information.
• 11.00%: Listed My Blog as the most valuable social media outlet to share MLS information.

• 93.67%: Satisfaction with their MLS support from local staff stayed the same or increased.

A few thoughts of takeaway…

Overall, the results are very affirming. The members of the real estate community that our technology services daily have a positive view of LIST-IT, they also really love the people at the local Associations/MLS organizations.

Regarding the education section, one can assume respondents know those technologies that they use the most – or – on which they’ve received the most training – or a combination of the 2. What do the education-related responses mean? A couple of things possibly: You need more diverse training. You need functionality within technology to be more accessible. If it were more accessible, would they be more willing to use it? And do so more frequently? Something to ponder.

The Apple iOS usage was high and not a real surprise. It’s just a matter of time before this percentage encroaches upon the current ‘norm’. When it does, Solid Earth will be ready … we’re already working on it.

Facebook is great. Admittedly, I’m there a lot. I have a busy life and I love people, so FB allows me to keep in touch with the people I love despite my schedule. And I’m eager to see what FB might become soon. When the IPO happens, an already really well-funded Facebook will become even more so and then what? One can only imagine how Marc Zuckerberg (flush with even more cash) will leverage QR codes!

Just kidding.

But, things are getting interesting with FB, which is fast morphing from digital business adolescence to being THE player in digital advertising. Take a look at this article I read last night. Cool stuff from some big companies that are spending large percentages of their ad budgets on FB (foregoing print by the way). Any real estate professional paying attention over the past few years has already discovered the value of FB. I mean, what is the real estate business? It’s all relationships. Keeping in touch. Staying visible to loyal clients. Facebook facilitates this like no contact list ever could.

Which is why tons of agents have flocked to Facebook to mine for gold. The methods for mining your friend list (and your friend’s friends) for leads are varied and in most cases, can be very successful if done well. The last thing you want is to see a listing pushed to your timeline for the 100th time today. It happens, but it won’t be tolerated for long. There are unwritten rules on FB and agents have been learning them the hard way. Again, done well, it can be a successful tool for your business.

There are pitfalls however and here’s an example.

The moral of this story? When you place your brand, your business and a lead-generating strategy on top of Facebook, you’re essentially like the little bird that sits on the Rhino’s head. Yes, you’re going to have lunch, but if that Rhino decides to scratch his back on a rock, you best be able to react or get squished. That’s the danger of working with Facebook. Policy can bite you and Mark Zuckerberg will not send you an email of advance warning.

Take a second and scan through this great article from AGBeat published on Wednesday.

Zillow has created Agent Hub, a services dashboard aimed directly at the individual agent – translation, “not the broker”. It’s another shot fired at the traditional broker model by a well-funded third party with no burden of rules and regulations. Read from the comments below this article and you’ll see that people are divided on the matter. Is Zillow simply tapping a ripe market and pushing the “old guard” closer to today’s consumer by forcing those stuck in 1980s practices to step up their skills? Or, is Zillow simply the new boogieman (t’was Google) that’s going to eventually slide around both the broker AND agent and feed the consumer directly?

What do you think? Are Trulia and Zillow (Zulia) Much ado about nothing or is the sky really falling?

The Clemens house, in Huntsville, was built in 1835 and lived on the same corner for 169 years.  In 2004 Huntsville Utilities was in the process of expanding their facilities and needed more space to accommodate the growing traffic in and through their new central office.  The Clemens House was standing right in the way of this growth.  Rather than destroy the house, Huntsville Utilities along with other teams in Huntsville decided to preserve the house, but this meant it had to be moved roughly 1 mile to a new location.  The uprooting of the house from its foundation, sharp turns, road closings, bystanders, and people involved to make this happen was truly a spectator sport in Huntsville for weeks in 2004.  

• Redundant Hosts for application deployment.  These aren’t your typical hosts.  Each has 192 GB of RAM and dual quad-core processors
• Storage with Redundant, hot-swappable controllers, power supplies / cooling fans, and disks.  A disk array totaling 26TB +/- of storage.
• Networking equipment boosted to GB ethernet.
• Backup facilities outside of the “Dixie Alley“
• Monitoring down to the fan speed on each host.

So it’s been a rough week at Solid Earth.  Over the last couple of years we have tried to communicate to our customers that transparency in our communication is critical.  To deliver enterprise software well, our company must disclose everything to our customers: our capacity, our strategy, our mistakes and our successes.  They need to know these things about us, and we need to know just as much about their operation as well, if we are to match goals and schedules effectively.  This level of communication is exceedingly difficult, especially as the company changes and customers change over time.  So as much as we love to talk about Spring and the (very) exciting new things happening at Solid Earth, it’s probably instructive for us, and for our customers to hear about the challenges we occasionally face, and how we work through them.

This week we had some serious challenges: a major (very rare) system outage on Sunday morning and then four different trips for the Solid Earthlings.  Trips included an MLS Demo in California, an important new equipment install in Chicago, an important industry meeting in Louisville and cancer treatment in Pennsylvania for me.  All of them proved to be difficult.  On the California trip, Lauren was delayed 10 hours on the way out (and now she’s stuck and can’t make it out of Modesto).  My flight to Philadelphia took off from Reagan National and the flaps stuck in the take-off position, requiring an emergency landing at Dulles.  Plus there was a bomb threat that closed several blocks around the Federal Courthouse in Huntsville, including our block, and that was just Monday!

So when we say TGIF this week, we really mean it.  Except maybe CMO Bill Fowler who is not too happy about the outage happening the weekend before he meets with 400-500 Association Execs at AEI, this year held in Louisville, a long-time Solid Earth client.   I am sure he’ll do a great job explaining what happened, I am going to drive up and join them for Saturday night, celebrating 10 years of serving MetroSearch Inc and The Greater Louisville Association of Realtors.

The network outage started early Sunday morning.  By 8AM I had spoken with several customers and the whole Exec staff at Solid Earth.  Chris Weir, Sys Admin at Solid Earth was in the Network Operations Center (NOC) working on the problem and he reported that a utility server had failed.  There was a backup server, but unfortunately it was en route by FedEx to a new backup center in Chicago, shipped out the previous Friday.  Chris was scheduled to fly out Monday morning to meet the shipment and install the equipment.

The loss of the server, a DNS server, brought down the whole network and without a backup, it stayed down.  Because of the backup, the failure occurred at the worst possible time.  The only solution was to build a new server so Robb Dempsey, Solid Earth’s CTO and Chris worked all day to build two new DNS servers.  Chris then flew to Chicago on Monday and finished the installation of the original backup DNS so that we now have a total of four.  We can promise that will never happen again.

The total outage for most users was about ten hours.  That’s a very long time, especially on an early Spring weekend with good weather in a market showing some signs of recovery.  It’s the longest outage at Solid Earth in many years and not something we take lightly.  Realtors were calling their MLS offices, their Brokers, Solid Earth, me personally as well as the rest of our staff.  They were not happy.  We know our friends, the MLS administrators in each of the markets we support, were also getting these calls and they were not happy with us at all.  We don’t blame them and we agree with everything they said.   It was a terrible day to be down.   But, we want you to know that we gave maximum effort to the problem all day Sunday until it was resolved.  We just still can’t believe the server, which had been up for a couple of years, failed on one of the two days it had ever been without a backup.

In these instances I think it sounds overly defensive to start giving our trusted and valued customers a bunch of statistics about our uptime.  Still, I also think it’s important to tackle any crisis with data-driven methodology, so while it’s defensive, it’s also true that Solid Earth is almost never down.  To illustrate this to our customers and to help you explain it to your customers, we have pulled together some statistics.  In the last six months, for the ten largest MLS systems:

• Uptime was 99.999%
• No system had a measurable outage within 35 days of another outage
• The average system had 74 days between measured outages
• One system was up for 3 months with no measured outages

We know these stats don’t help much when you are talking to an angry subscriber, but it is important to recognize under pressure, that Solid Earth has confidence in the platform.  I personally have a great deal of confidence in the platform and as CEO and half-owner of Solid Earth, I have a great deal invested in the platform.  While I sincerely apologize for Sunday, I am proud of the numbers.  So, finally on this topic, the new DNS servers are up, that part of the move to Chicago is complete, and the network is fast and stable again.

The network is being restructured for the launch of Spring, for more on that watch for a post from CTO Robb Dempsey. We’ve rebuilt the network from scratch, again, and the Chicago move is only a small part of it.  It’s interesting if you’re a techy and if you’re an MLS subscriber you’ll love it because it should mean the end of outages altogether by the end of this year, in Spring as well as LIST-IT.

We have other rituals which define and are transforming our culture.  Here are a few of them:

• Demo Day – Every other Tuesday Everyone is invited to a demo of the progress on Spring.  Ideas, critiques and questions are encouraged.
• Demo Day Doughnuts –  One requirement for Demo Day is to have Hot Krispy Kremes on site.
• Office Helicopters – pure fun and stress relief.

Do you have rituals within your company?  Share one with us.  If not, start one and let us know how we can help encourage you in the journey to making your daily interactions more habitual.

I will just pledge to you that everything here is 100% sincere. You’ll read no fluff from us here at Solid Earth. I used to write fluff for a living. This is really a blog. The online Solid Earth diary. No editorial process. Type. Submit. Which means you sometimes have to suffer through my “diary” to get to the information. Sorry. I’m the guy with the admin password.

So this week Lauren and I were in Charleston, personally launching our newest product: Downstream IDX. Here’s an actual site using it. The demo sessions went really well, as expected. We entertained about 175 members over two days and got a lot of traction with subscriptions. Charleston Staff was happy, the members got something new and we left with the feeling that we’d done yet another thing that would demonstrate value to a great, loyal client.

As Solid Earthlings, you now have a new IDX product to offer your members. This is very important. There are dozens of IDX options for agents and brokers and the functionality and price are widely varied. We did a great amount of research before committing to this project and you only need to glance at Downstream IDX and see that we’ve done something significant. I pose that we’re evening the arms race with the big national names in real estate searching. We set out to give our clients an offering that would make their websites look as impressive and well-developed as anything else out there.

Look at it from a broker’s perspective. Do they need a website? Yes. Do they need a property search on that site? Most definitely. Then, if you’re going to invest in an IDX product you want the “look and feel” to allow the consumer to leave Zillow, Trulia or Realtor.com and not get user interface whiplash when they land on something local. A beautiful design is so important. It communicates legitimacy. A poor design communicates ignorance. Downstream IDX is beautiful and functional and we’re very proud.

I think we’ve done something big in releasing Downstream IDX. I hope you do too.

As I drove from Pensacola to Ft  Walton today, I noticed lots of new building, huge beachfront and near-beach construction and what felt like some renewed activity in a market that’s been pretty flat (see inset for 5-year chart).   The best news about this chart is found when you compare it to Orlando, or Birmingham, or Louisville.  Many places have faired very badly indeed when compared to ECAR.

Today Susan and Cliff and I talked about a wide range of things including the future of Spring MLS, the revolutionary new MLS platform from Solid Earth and how we’ll be releasing it to ECAR.  We talked about advertising on the public site, EmeraldCoastHomesOnline.com and how that might work, if the MLS Committee wants to pursue the concept.  We cited the example of www.mlsarealistings.com in Tennessee as a “comp”.  There is significant revenue being generated from the site and ECAR has more traffic.  There are issues with advertising though, and Cliff and Susan are still thinking about it, understandably.  The public site in the area, www.emeraldcoasthomesonline.com has huge traffic but it’s the only site that does not carry ads.  The public loves this I’m sure and we may loose traffic if we cover up the site with ads.  Still I think tasteful placement of ads could be tolerated and would produce significant revenue.

At the end of our meeting today, as a serious thunderstorm passed the restaurant, we shared our hopes for the market, we also shared a desire to increase cooperation on the panhandle and to advance the interest of the real estate trade associations who have done so much for their subscribers.  Thanks Cliff!  Thanks Susan! And thanks all of those who made this long relationship possible.