Webforms Went Down….Again
It seems to happen more and more these days. Our favorite pieces of software going down, the implications of which have a drastic effect on upon each REALTORS® real estate business.
The latest of these outages was Webforms, this is the second time that Webforms has gone down in 2014 with the first being pretty major.
They updated, in Alberta, 84 different forms and it crashed the system for well over a day.
For Agents that are reliant on these pieces of technology to run their business, it had a devastating affect on their ability to service their clients.
Not being able to access a purchase contract to write an offer, for an Agent, is like your car running out of gas in the middle of nowhere.
No fuel. No running car.
No contract. No home for their client.
It’s not Just Webforms
In Alberta, specifically in Calgary and Edmonton, Fusion and MLXchange both went down last week.
Now we could be placing blame here but I wanted to at least give our Alberta clients some ideas as to how they could deal with these outages.
Places where you can search online for properties. Places where you can get the forms you need. How you can deal with certain tech issues and still continue to do business.
Solutions to Forms and Searches
First the Property Search Workaround
In order for you to do some searches, you will still need some technology, specifically some software. Two things that we could suggest would be to get yourself on Prospects.
If you are a Calgary REALTOR®, you have access to Prospects for free. Prospects will allow you to search for properties that are listed without having to go through MLXchange, AND if you are a Touchbase user you could set up appointments right within the app.
The other option would be to look on Realtor.ca, as well, I have used my own website’s IDX feed to search for listings that fit my clients criteria.
Is it a pain to have to set up viewings? Ya. You actually have to PICK.UP.THE.PHONE. Ugh. All kidding aside, this would be a decent workaround.
Access to Forms
We would be remiss if we didn’t toot our own horn here…actually, it isn’t even us telling you about our value. Look at the picture above….AREA actually posted that we have the forms that you would need during the Webforms outage.
As an AREA member you have a free account already set up and waiting for you under repree. To access the sign up page CLICK HERE
Now the other way you could do this…and this is something we don’t recommend as you will not be in compliance with RECA in a couple of different ways…but you could always save a copy of the contract to the cloud.
Be Prepared for Outages…Choose Wisely
Last thing…be prepared for more outages coming out of those forms that are on the Web…also known as Webforms.
We can proudly say that in over 4 years in business, we have been shut down for a grand total of SIX HOURS.
Not 6 days or weeks or months. Six Hours. Choose your form provider wisely.