Here it is on a nice Wednesday evening about 9:00 PM when homebuyers may be searching for homes and the ENTIRE Advanced Access network appears to be DOWN, again!
No website, no AA forum, no Advanced Access homepage, NADA!
What will be their excuse THIS TIME??? Will we just get another canned excuse? If you are looking fora dependable real estate hosting company, this is NOT the place to put your marketing dollars. This company has become one BIG JOKE since they tried designing a new 4.0 platform and even worse since their sale to Dominion. BEWARE!!!! STEAR CLEAR!!!!! This company has turned completely upside down as in my logo.
Filed under: Outrage, Site Down | Tagged: Business, hosting, Marketing, Social, Technology
I still have about 15 contacts within the company and I have just confirmed with 4 of them that all sites are down. From what I have been told all of the company Directors are en route to a corporate meeting in Virginia and there is no management in Anaheim to resolve the problem.
Given the recent problems, including today’s, what’s the best solution for agents who are willing to move their AA site to another provider, but simply don’t have the time to rebuild everything?
There are many many options. The honest truth is what do you expect from your website? I am currently doing a comparitive analysis of website providers for my clients (most of which are AA clients) which will be available at no charge on my blog in about 2 weeks. Click on my name to find my company website. I have no affiliation with any company and will likely stay away from any type of relationship due to the situations like these. For the sake of full disclosure, it is in my clients best interest that we have no “vested” interest in referring our clients to a web dev company. For a few office presentation’s I recently did I allowed one of their Sales Speakers (who is no longer with AA) to tag along and piggy back on my presentations. Never again will that be the case. I cannot advise anyone to use AA. Sadly after 6 years with the company, they have become not even a shell of their former selves. It really was a great company a few years ago.
Juan – I am so pissed right now that I have posted on about every blog out there that comes up on a Google search to tell people to STAY AWAY from this sinking ship! If they DO open back up, what will the excuse be this time. Their servers were supposed to be in a fire-proof building with all types of safety backups. What do Directors know about fixing things? Where are the techies at? What is more important, the meeting or getting sites back up?
I will spare no words when the forum goes live again!
btw. I don’t know if you already knew this but Dominion Enterprises which owns AA, E-Neighborhoods, Homes.com etc. is being shopped by Landmark. Interestingly enough, the last employee newsletter I received in December stated that 07′ was the most profitable year in company history…
No mention of client retention or customer satisfaction though.
I don’t know much about Landmark but anything would be better than what has happened since 4.0 was introduced and Dominion took over. A new owner would best serve the clients by dumping 4.0 and starting over with a product based on a better platform and easier to convert 3.0 over to. Point2 has made consistent updates to their software with nothing but a small hiccup along the way during the transitions. Yet, Advanced Access limps along with a loser (4.0) and fails to throw enough money at fixing it along with everything else that has gone wrong.
Sites are back up but no CS is on the forum to post what went wrong this time. They may need a writing coach first to tell them how best to soft-sell everyone again like they have in the past to keep their clients.
I find the “most profitable year in company history” thing hard to beleive. I saw the client count we had in our internal program, and it was usually around 29,000 for the whole year (making that “over 30k clients” thing a little bit of a stretch).
Maybe they got all that profit from laying off employees when Dominion told them they weren’t making an acceptable profit margin? All the employees that quit and probably helped those numbers as well.
Advanced Access response for last nights power outage was simply to call it (at least 4 hours of outage during prime search time) a ‘brief’ power outage with some more finger pointing that it was something out of their control. The shame is that about 28,000 agents weren’t even aware of it so life goes on at AA as usual. Grab your life jackets folks, we’re taking on water and going down!
Here was what they bragged about last May:
“The new data center is a state-of-the-art facility with multiple fiber paths for internet connectivity, redundant environmental control systems, on-staff AC and electrical technicians and on-site backup diesel generators.”
I seem to be spending a good percentage of my time these days designing new custom Point2 sites for soon-to-be former AA subsribers. Several months ago I stopped accepting new commissions for AA site customization.
Twice within the last month or so, I’ve been talking with prospective clients on the phone and sent them to look at one of my favorite Flash movies that I’ve done, for JenniferPeschken.com, an AA site. Both times, her site has been completely gone — nothing but a blank white page. So, I called Jennifer, then she called AA to get them to fix her site. Both incidents took place on weekends or holidays, so her site was down several days each time. In contrast, I’ve never noticed a Point2 client’s site offline and I’ve never had a problem reaching someone on the phone.
Hey, nice tips. Perhaps I’ll buy a bottle of beer to that person from that chat who told me to visit your blog
Interesting info hope to come back soon=D