WAV Group recently completed our 2011 MLS Technology Survey where we received feedback from nearly 11,000 respondents, from 66 MLSs around the US and Canada. Most importantly, the feedback was from both MLS staff which is always important, and the actual users. In fact, we only included results for MLS systems that had both staff and user ratings. The results were very interesting!
We will be publishing an Executive Summary of the results next week for download but one of the more interesting things we noted was that MLS staff and MLS users see their technology quite differently and also rate it quite differently.
In the following graph, which had all respondents rate their overall satisfaction of their MLS system, on a scale of “1 – 10”, we see MLS staff gave a much higher satisfaction rating than the actual users. This graph shows aggregated results for all vendors and systems but the trend was very consistent across vendors and systems. The delta however varied greatly when looking at individual products. One system for example showed a staff rating of “10”, a perfect score while users only gave the system a rating of 6.507! That’s a pretty big difference. You will be able to see more of these details in the Executive Summary next week.
Some other key findings to note in advance of our report:
Good Things
- Systems are solid, reliable and performance is pretty good across the board.
- Users gave most systems a thumbs up on “ease of use” which is great to see!
- The large majority of staff believe their vendors are responsive and listen.
- Vendor help desk support ranks nearly as high as MLS supplied help desk support.
- Staff report that vendors still do not do a great job of debugging upgrades before release – Q&A needs improvement.
- Users are amazed there are MLS systems that are not accessible by any browser.
- Mobile technology is seen as lacking almost across the board. Users are looking for easy to use, quick apps, that let them do more than search, on their phone, iPad or tablet.
- Mapping features seem to be enjoyed by some but many complain about complicated interfaces and inaccurate data.
