Re: Poor Webmaster Personal Sites

On 2005-03-25 00:14:15 -0500, "Stephen Horrillo"
<usenet@stephenhorrillo.com> said:

> I've never heard of a 40 seat Realty company that spends 150 K on software.
> Where I'm from there's no getting around fees to use the MLS and very good
> software comes with the annual dues (about $800 a year for the broker). For
> $17.5 a month the software becomes a contact manager and a whole lot more.



They are a special case, I guess - they have locations in 8
geographically disparate islands in the country (I'm in the Bahamas
btw) and the costs of software and systems to interlink all of those
offices into one central system that was updated in real time were
astronomical. their website now powers that, along with providing a
huge array of reporting and communication tools, client extranet for
real time updates on listings etc.

Factor in that a large amojority of their clients are overseas, add a
phone monopoly with rates at over $1 a minute for a call to the US, and
the client extranet alone saves thousands a year... it all adds up very
quickly.