Wednesday, 20th of August 2008 at 08:27:38 PMThe ARMLS Committee held a meeting today, the first one after the conversion to the FlexMLS system. And boy, was that one full agenda, it was one of the longest meetings that I have attended since becoming a member almost a year ago. Since there was a break to allow the ARMLS staff to concentrate on the conversion, the number of appeals that we considered was a bit higher than normal (but still less than I would have thought). After we worked through the appeals, our attention was turned to Compliance Issues.
Compliance Issues
At this meeting, the compliance director raised several issues that he felt could use some work within the rules and regulations. A couple of which will probably get their own dedicated posting since they are so interesting and challenging that I would encourage everyone to chime in their opinion on that topic. I’ll just leave it for right now by saying that several situations were raised that made me go, hmmm, never would have thought of that. Gee, I wonder how we can handle that, etc….
New Business
After spending several hours going over the compliance issues, we turned to our new business items. Some of which we tabled so that additional research and contemplation can be given. Here are a couple:
Auction Listings
Appears that there have been reports of listings in the MLS that are auction listings, which are okay, but the situation arose that these listing fell into two categories, those that you can put an offer in before the auction, and those that you cannot. There were stories of frustration that clients wanted to look at and make an offer on a property, but that wasn’t allowed and the auction was scheduled too far in the future for the buyers. This was a topic that we’re continuing to monitor and look for solutions to.
FlexMLS Designations
This problem is one that I saw coming since early beta. We have so many designations and certifications in this industry, some are NAR approved, some are not, some don’t expire, some do. A system doesn’t really exist to track who has which designation/certification, yet they exist in FlexMLS as part of the agent profile. Currently the agent is not in control of which Designations are displayed and which are not. These are left to the individual boards to manage as part of their membership. Many boards don’t want to deal with managing (and policing) this area. Which honestly, I don’t blame them, it’s a difficult task and one that would take some work to manage.
FlexMLS Wireless Display
There was a question on any recommendations on changes to the wireless interface (add or remove functions or data). Those that used the wireless feature was quite happy with it’s current function and feel that it could improve, but it was already leaps and bounds over anything that existed before.
Reverse Prospecting in FlexMLS
There was a report that this was not functioning as expected and that FBS is actively working on it.
FBS and FlexMLS
There were many kudos running around the room for FBS and their staff for working very hard during the transition and that many issues raised were resolved so quickly that they were never officially recorded. I have to agree, I was happy with the transition, while there were some problems, there could have been many more and much worse than what we experienced.
Related posts:
You are right, the designation issue is a tricky one. The Phoenix Association has a membership module in which we track all NAR approved member designations. The software does not allow for designations that are not NAR approved. Nightly PAR transmits to both NAR (NRDS) and ARMLS changes to it’s membership database (AAR pulls information daily for its’ system from NAR). The rub comes when agents want designations that are either not NAR approved, or designations that are not really designations. For example, someone may want the “designation” REALTOR or Associate Broker after their name. Those type of things are not designations. REALTOR is a type of membership, Associate Broker is a type of license. One of the great things about Flex is that if an agent wants those type of things after their name they can modify their signature/business card in Flex to add them. If an agent goes in and modifys their last name to add designations it screws up the sort and will be overwritten the next time a change is sent up to their record.