HENRY J. DIGIACOMO – ‘It’s user-friendly´

Day or night, from the road or home, from a cell phone or Palm Pilot, an increasing number of local Realtors are now able to access their Multiple Listing Service through the Internet.

The new product is internetMLS.com, developed by Norwell-based Advanced Marketing Services. The new disciples include the Norfolk-Bristol County and Fall River realtor associations, with the Cape Cod and Islands Realtors Association being the latest convert.

“This is an Internet-based product built around good common sense. It’s user-friendly, it’s intuitive. It’s the MLS system for the millennium,” said Henry J. DiGiacomo, executive vice president and chief executive officer of the Cape & Islands Association of Realtors. “You have access to it anywhere you have access to the Internet.”

The CCIAR just switched to internetMLS a few weeks ago. AMS Chief Technology Officer Dimitry Petion declined to go into detail about potential future deals with other associations, including MLS-Property Information Network, the largest MLS organization in the state. However, he did say that several organizations from Massachusetts to California “are either under contract or in the process of coming under contract,” and would possibly be online within the next six months.

Previously, agents had to use certain software installed on certain hardware, using a dial-up modem system with often limited connection capabilities. InternetMLS, however, is Internet-based and Windows-compatible.

“It’s incredible access, an incredibly powerful software package,” DiGiacomo said.

DiGiacomo has been with the CCIAR for nine years, and in that time has experienced four different “rollouts” of MLS systems, he said.

“This is the smoothest, most member-friendly rollout in the history of the association,” he said.

Doug Azarian, CCIAR president, said the association decided to switch over to internetMLS because of the easy access, the fact that no additional software is required, and all members can access it from any computer. The product also includes some key customization features, such as setting up a profile and being sent a flagged e-mail when listings fitting your criteria are posted.

“You can e-mail information and access it from anywhere. You don’t have to carry an address book; you can just hop on the computer,” said Azarian. “It is so easy and convenient to e-mail listings. It also gives us the ability to have virtual tours.”

Because a link to internetMLS is featured on the CCIAR home page, consumers can also use the association’s Web site to log on, search properties and contact agents, DiGiacomo said.

Other functions that may be coming very soon to the service include additional reporting information and a connection to Banker & Tradesman’s industry information, according to Azarian.

A Local Presence
While there have been a few minor kinks in the system in the first weeks, Azarian noted that AMS has been very cooperative in helping the association work them out. AMS offers tech support via phone or e-mail.

AMS provides Web-based solutions for the real estate industry and other “vertical” markets. According to Petion, it was the first company to roll out an Internet-based solution for the real estate industry and was first online in 1997.

“We’ve been doing this longer than any other vendor,” he said.

InternetMLS is a “turn-key” solution, Petion said: Realtors need no additional software or hardware other than the Internet to run the program, which also supports the most advanced technology, such as html. The program can even be accessed through a Web-enabled cell phone or PDA device.

“Information is power. Our goal is to provide the Realtor with information, and provide them with a tool that allows them to get information and use that information,” Petion said. “How do we get them the information faster so they can be more productive? How can they take that information and relay it to a potential seller or a potential buyer?”

With the technology available to the everyday consumer, sometimes a potential buyer knows about an available property before the Realtor, said Petion. That’s something AMS would like to reverse not only for Realtors, but also for consumer benefit.

“As the marketplace evolves and changes, along with the demography, a lot of the people involved don’t have a lot of time on their hands. The need for access to data is very important, and it’s important for the new buyer to be working with someone like that,” Petion said.

Internet MLS enables Realtors to send e-mails to potential buyers and sellers quickly, to make sure the listing has “the maximum number of eyes,” he added.

“If I’m selling, and I give the sell to an agent, I want the agent to have the maximum number of eyeballs seeing that my home is for sale,” said Petion. “It’s as simple as: once I give you my listing, I want to see it on public portals – maybe Realtor.com or local portals.”

Technology has been slow to reach many facets of the real estate industry. When developing the product, AMS set out to learn why.

“It’s always been a very interesting marketplace. Although it’s a multibillion-dollar industry, technology has been slow to get to this industry. Our challenge was to try to understand why, and to develop a solution we felt was going to be accepted,” Petion said.

Part of the reason technology hasn’t been immediately embraced by the industry was the fact that, in many situations, technology was being offered just for the sake of technology, said Petion. Part of the reason for the growing success of internetMLS is its simplicity, he said.

According to the CCIAR, the key is access.

“For our members, we always had a problem with the system being bogged down and slow. We couldn’t have all our members on at once,” Azarian said.

In traditional MLS setups, an association with several thousand members went out and purchased telephone lines to have, say, 40 or 50 modems with MLS access, Petion said. So at any one moment, only 50 of 1,000 members could access information.

“So we’re looking at 950 paying customers starving, in a sense, as they cannot get to the data they need to conduct business,” Petion said. “This enables Realtors to get information when they need it, how they need it, anytime, every time.” Azarian agreed.

“The other day we had up to 500 members on it at the same time,” he said. “Now there’s no reason any member can’t access it.”

And the service, even with the future purchase of additional features, will cost the same or less than the former system, Azarian said.

“One of the things we’ve been able to leverage is that we’ve had a local presence for our customers in Massachusetts, and they’ve all been able to stand up behind our product,” Petion said. “They all say it’s the best they’ve ever seen and used in their lives, and these people have been in the industry for several decades.

“When you can get someone who’s a non-Gen-X-er to say they’ve used a Web-based tool and that they’ve made money with it, that carries a lot of weight.”