Back in my Navy days my last job was as the ship's Ordnance Officer. Guns, missiles, associated radars and the men that kept them running were my responsibility. If you're a young man in his early 20s, could there be a better job on a ship than to stand out on the bridge wing as a practice missile went WOOOSH off the rail to chase down its target?
Now many moons later, what passes for excitement in my life is of a far different (and less combustible) variety. Sometimes it's good, other times it's more of a "something fell down and went BOOM!". The latter can be a test of preparedness and flexibility.
Recently our MLS service provider didn't so much fall down as they got pushed by some ransomware hackers. Net effect, MLS went down hard with no clear estimate as to when (or if) service would be restored. And it wasn't just our MLS, but nationwide to anyone who had the same provider.
Initially, there was no way to enter new homes for sale, to do searches, to email listings to clients, all just GONE. And not like the old days with a printed book, the best you could do was look at the portal sites and know status could be wrong.
The good news, our MLS was able to create a site to enter NEW listings. They flexed some rules about timing and marketing to allow for the circumstances.
Our MLS had already planned to transition from one provider to another, so they expedited the move and after a few weeks we had an operating system again, but with a few strings attached. We didn't get all the bells and whistles out of the gate. No aerial maps. All our previously set up searches? None of those transferred over either.
The net effect is there's a lot of work to be done to recreate what we had. The good news? IDX data transfers seem to have been clean, so we don't have to tinker with 100s of custom searches set up on our Wordpress site.
More good news? Blog posts aren't impacted by MLS outages if you link to sites of your own creation! Even during the outage, we still received calls from potential clients.
Yes, it's more work in the short term for us to be 100% restored, but when you don't have all your eggs in one basket, a BOOM event may scramble some of those eggs, but your other eggs will be okay.
Are you prepared for BOOM type events?
Until next Tuesday, just Ask An Ambassador if you need help,
Bill & Liz aka BLiz
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