Is there anything more cliche than members complaining about an MLS switching vendors? It seems like a right of passage an MLS executive must go through to earn their stripes. The game is always the same. For months you send out emails notifying them the existing system is going to change, you hold training classes, you visit offices, and you ask for feedback. After all this preparation you finally make the switch. Then what happens? Pandemonium!

“I never was told!”
“Nobody consulted us!”
“The new system sucks!”
“Why did we have to change!”

If you want to see the actual “shit REALTORS say” just head over to the Facebook Page that was created by a disgruntled REALTOR at ARMLS, “Bring iMapp back to ARMLS“. (How much you wanna bet there was a similar outcry back in the day when they switched from another vendor to iMapp?)

ARMLS is one of the best in the business when it comes to communicating with their members but Corelogic didn’t do them any favors this time when their Realist product suffered an outage (for most of yesterday). Within a few hours people were on Twitter and Facebook and the blogosphere complaining about the switch.

Scary stuff. The level of rancor is even surprising to me.

Makes you think, what if this was an MLS conversion gone wrong? Wait a sec, I seem to remember something about that.

But the real question is If Twitter and Facebook can bring down the leadership on Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Komen then an MLS provider should be easy!

I expect this situation at ARMLS will blow over rather quickly. But I’m sure it’s caught the attention of many MLS execs out there: Beware the Mob.