Former Advanced Access Employees Sound Off!

Jan 22nd, 2008
The IDX product for Advanced Access has long been a huge problem, and will definitely not be in any form of working order any time soon.

I say this as the former manager of the department that “John Adams” mentioned above.

I just became aware of this site today, and am glad there is a resource for current and former clients/employees to document their frustrations with this company’s failings.

I sincerely regret leaving a department that I worked very hard on in such chaos, but I simply had enough with the company. The IDX product was constantly not working due to archaic programming methods and simple lack of attention to it. When serious work began on 4.0, all upkeep for the IDX program stopped completely – and this lack of maintenance on the IDX product continues to this day due to the continued efforts to fix all the 4.0 issues that are still around. I found myself in a position where I had to defend a product that simply didn’t work to both clients and the MLS partners we have contracts with.

Disillusioned, frustrated, and overwhelmed with day to day work that had piled up and was beyond my ability to whittle down (partly due to AA’s decision to lay off my assistant in late June, the ONLY help I had in that department, making it so I was now in charge of day to day work and manager work) I decided to take a job with another company, and couldn’t be happier about the decision.

Anyway, the reason I’m posting this little story is that I don’t want people to have to deal with AA’s crap anymore. 4.0, IDX, everything is in bad shape right now, and will most likely not be fixed anytime soon. The representatives you speak to on the AA forums and in the call center are blowing smoke up your ass whenever they say things like “it’ll be fixed/added/upgraded soon”. I say this as a former smoke blower that just couldn’t take it anymore.

For those of you who are still current clients and have the AA build IDX program: CHECK IT and make sure it is working. The only reason I beleive AA has gotten away with this program’s problems for so long is because the web site owners don’t search their own site too often. Check results against your MLS’s search results, and check it against other IDX providers’ results.

PS. Just for more info on the IDX problem: while I was still employed with the company, I was looking to buy a home in my area since I was recently married. I attempted to do these searches on what I was most familiar with: the AA IDX product. I was UNABLE to use the product that I was in charge of for reliable results and had to use competitor sites. That really says something, I think.

January 22, 2008
I just wanted to back up what was posted here. I am a former manager of the IDX/MLS Dept., and I can tell you that things will most likely not get better.

From what I observed during my time there, it seemed that new programmers would come on board, realize what an absolute mess everything is and leave not wanting to deal with it. I don’t beleive any of the programmers are incompetent or lazy – they are simply given the task to fix major issues left by the programmers before them. That cycle is why you as the AA client don’t get things fixed

January 23, 2008
MLSNI is very large, and does take a long time to update if they are downloading the FULL set of data and photos (photos especially). If everything were working correctly, they would only be downloading what is new/updated every day, which takes minimal time. The replication process (the process that parses the data from the download area and puts it into the search database) being used is archaic, full of bugs and issues, and was built really assuming they would only being using it for 1-5 different MLS feeds. As of the time I left, they were downloading ~135 different feeds.

The problem is NOT the download – it’s what happens after the download where everything gets screwed up. They unfotunately have no way of knowing WHAT is missing, so the only fix is to either re-download individual listings by request, or download ALL of it again and hope things go better this time.

What I’m getting at is: the lack of updates on the IDX feeds is not because it takes a long time to do the normal every day download; it’s because the process breaks, then a client such as yourself may not notice for several days before reporting it, then it may take several days for the report to reach the IDX programmer, then it’ll take a day to apply a fix that may just yield the same problems and start the cycle over again. By this time, data has been out of date for a week, maybe more.

Some trivia here for you: during my time there, MLSNI was often used as my example to the powers that be of how broken the system is. For example, over several weeks I documented what percentage of the listings in MLSNI had photos available. That number avereaged between 50% and 60%…you can’t tell me that half of all active listings in that area do not have photos. I won’t say these reports fell on deaf ears necessarily – I do beleive (maybe naively so) that the IDX problem is well known and recognized as a serious issue by those who would be in charge of fixing it, however the bigger priority seems to be getting 4.0 to work properly (1.25 years later as of now) and building the 3.0 to 4.0 conversion process. Who knows when that’ll be done, and who knows when the inevitable bugs and issues from it will be worked out.

Bottom line is that NO ONE is touching IDX unless it is an emergency situation where all IDX is down. Then it gets a band-aid.

January 23rg, 2008
I’m also an ex employee of Advanced Access but I was in the Website Marketing (cough) Department. I was (and still am thanks to high up insiders) very familiar with what was going on. You’ve already heard that it won’t get any better and it really truly won’t. Justin is to busy trying to save money than retain clients and fix the overall problems. His head is up corporates ass. Now Aron Spegon, Director of Customer Service, wants to put all liability on the clients to help reduce the expectations of AA. New clients no longer have someone helping them with their new website. They have to do it all on their own. Shitty business practice? I think so… and so do many more.

I bet John and Jerra are pissed at the downfall of this company.

I left AA after three years in December 2007 because of their lack of concern for existing employees needs (and then some), the way I was forced to treat our Marketing Clients, and for the way the company was turning out to be. I wanted to work for a reputable company. When I told them that, I didn’t mean bad reputation.

I am now self employeed and serving clients the way they should be served and giving them the support they need to become a success WITHOUT Advanced Access.

I can help you get away from them without royally screwing up your rankings if you have a 4.0 site. If you have a 3.0 site, it will have an effect but the long run wil be better for you.

January 28, 2008

Does it really matter that the ex presidents are seemingly unwilling to give out their true identities…? However they can matter of factly speak about the going on’s and policies and procedures currently in place at AA? Hmmm… Working in the office next door to Sean G for about a year, I can adamantly state that Sean was working all day every day with his hands tied trying to make a difference at AA. I was in a “Director’s Meeting” when he was even brought in to explain how and why we needed to make changes to the way Advanced Access handles the IDX data (Mark Gilmore arranged this presentation). How many of the recommendations he made were followed…? I’ll let Sean handle that one.

Does it really matter that the reality is that since John Morris and Justin LaJoie left, AA decided to attempt to keep the course instead of keep up with the competition. Does it really matter that the “Intellic@rds” that are touted as an email marketing solution are dated back to 2001-02? When is the scheduled “deployment” (its a popular word that was introduced by IT at AA to make it seem like progress was being made) for the next version of the Intellic@rds? Old news… No suggestions nor proposals were ever seriously considered by Captain Edward John Smith and his Yes men and woman. The only proposals and suggestions I ever saw being implemented were when it dealt with cutting earned commissions and bonuses of its employees.

Let’s not point the fingers at the individuals who attempted to keep AA cutting edge and providing good service to its clients. I for one, and can attest on the behalf of Sean, that pride was taken in providing our clients the best possible services that we were capable of providing based on how tied up our hands were.

Lets rather talk about the fact that if you are a current AA member and are running the newest version of Internet Explorer, you cannot edit the content of your website… There is a work around, obviously I am aware of that, but what are we really talking about? Is it our clients responsibilty to jump through hoops to use something they are paying $40 or $50 a month in “hosting” for? Or should AA man up and resolve the problems like any responsible company would. Apparently AA feels it is being held hostage by Microsoft for releasing IE7… Hmmmm…

Third-level domain names anyone? Oh yeah, we offered those. What happened to them? I guess they are not as important as “deploying” banner advertising to its clients asking them for more money by selling them Leadmore. Programming is more than on top of it when it comes to that. but where is the upgrade to 4.0 for all 30,000+ clients (which we all know was a bogus number ask Gary Brackle) . Realistically 4.0 is garbage, people are much better offf with 3.0, but at least with 4.0 you can still sort of use your page editor. To sum this up, though it may seem like there are ex-employees who are unfairly letting off steam realize that Advanced Access was a GREAT company to work for. And it USED to provide great products and services to it’s clients. But those days have long since passed and when you feel like things could have been done to avoid it’s downfall, you almost feel responsible. I know that I do.