Rapattoni recently announced that Andy Rapattoni and Rex Marr had celebrated 45 years of serving the real estate industry. I not sure about you but that gives me a whole lot of perspective. Over the years I’ve seen lot of companies getting bought, sold or just fade away. I’ve said it before, it’s inspiring to see such resilience.
But that doesn’t mean Andy and Niki are stopping. Rapattoni has launched a web based mobile interface for the tablet and smartphone. This web-app can be used on variety of mobile devices including iPhones/iPads and Android based smartphones/tablet.
I may be biased but I think this is smart move by Rap, I see a lot of vendors doing partnerships with consultants to create native solutions for their MLS systems. Native is fine, and sure you get a snappier user experience but what you gain by “being in the app store” you lose by having full control. And where do you stop, iOS, Android? How many code bases to you want to support?
As the saying goes “Software never sleeps”. Iteration is key. You need to be able to tweak, cajole, sand, and polish your product. That’s the work that makes a good product great. It’s very difficult to do that when your disparate teams.
Rapattoni has also gotten into the public facing website game with its Rapattoni Integrated Website Service (IWS). As with their other product the new IWS works with their existing applications, which seems to be an advantage over non-MLS vendor solutions.
More and more MLS vendors are adding this type of solution to their offerings. In some cases, like Solid Earth, it is becoming a “tent pole” type of product.
Hey Greg, thanks for the mention! Can you expand on the “tent pole” analogy? Who do you see as the primary beneficiaries of that strategy?
@Matt I’ve had a few inquires of this “tent pole” analogy. What I mean by this is that I see a many MLS vendors who see having a “public” view of MLS data as becoming more and more important. This can mean having a full blown public facing website integrated in to their MLS system or maybe beefing up their various “client portals”. Your new Spring product seems to be the most tightly integrated and a big, if not the biggest part of Spring’s overall value proposition.
Whether its “collaboration” or just giving consumers the ability to get access to MLS data with less friction I see this being a key point of more and more MLS Vendor’s pitches.
The obvious model for this is HAR. While their public facing website is not a CoreLogic product they view the public facing component just as important, if not more, than their actually MLS system.
There are real challenges. In some markets the pressure from brokers will be so intense that they will not allow their MLS providers to adopt such a strategy.
Hope this explains this a little better.