Georgia MLS is among the largest multiple listing service providers in the nation and is recognized as a national leader winning Consumer Experience Index awards for Customer Service, Training and Data Quality. Recently, Georgia MLS partnered with floor plan technology leader, CubiCasa, to provide their service to all 52,000 Realtors they serve.
WAV Group met with Richard Boone, CEO and John Ryan, Chief Marketing Officer of Georgia MLS to discuss the strategy of launching floor plan software as a basic service of the MLS and to learn how agents are adopting the new service.
WAV Group research has shown that other than location and photos, the most important information that consumers want to understand about a property online is the floor plan. Until recently, floor plans have been too difficult to scan, or are too expensive. Today, CubiCasa has rolled out a freemium service at GA MLS and other MLSs to solve these problems for Realtors®. I learned that the base technology from CubiCasa is also the platform upon which the FBS FloPlan® product is built. When you remove the difficulty of creating a floor plan and you make it free to the Realtor, you remove the friction that has prevented floor plans from being created on every listing.
This is a fairly technical benefit, but one that is important to appraiser members of the MLS. The CubiCasa floor plans, or appraisal format that calculates gross living area, is also acceptable by Fannie Mae.
Georgia MLS has a long-term strategic vision to collaborate with CubiCasa on enhancing the floorplan services for Realtors. They intend to move away from loading the plan as an image and move it into its own searchable field. Additionally, they want to automate the process to allow the floor plan to be loaded directly into the MLS listing from CubiCasa, so the Realtor does not need to edit the listing to add it. Today, CubiCasa processes the data captured by the agent on their phone and returns the floor plan in less than a day – but the agent needs to load it.
Congratulations to Georgia MLS for another successful product launch. We are excited to measure the effectiveness and adoption of this innovative new MLS service as it grows.
