“Realestate.com.au apparently has had server troubles. In fact the emails to agents (that they pay a lot of money for) from interested buyers around April and May just didn’t work properly. The backlog has only been clearing in the last day or so. Lots of VERY unhappy agents and the class action word has already been mentioned as there is potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost commission.”

Craig Pontey

What makes the whole mess even worse is that REA releases a note to all clients stating that only “some” clients were effected.

That is like a slap in the face especially when they admit this first occured when they upgraded the servers. So not only is their monitoring procedures useless, but so is their upgrade procedures.

Anybody who has ever upgraded anything on a server knows that is the time you check, check and check again. If anything is going to fail, that is the time. Most large companies will do upgrades on test servers first before they upgrade mission critical computers and thats the crux of the problem… their mission critical computers failed and they did not notice for at least 6 weeks, and probably longer. They failed to check properly.. and that’s unacceptable.

This is because all email enquiries did not stop – agents I have spoken to all continued to receive email enquiries and it is clear from Dave’s comment that this problem only effected one or more of the number of servers.

If the enquires ceased altogether then I am sure it would have been picked up earlier by both agents and REA.

This would have been a very long weekend for REA and I am sure this will never happen again (or I would hope that it wouldn’t!

But it does seem that sloppy monitoring and security are becoming the norm for even the biggest IT companies.

Account reps then? They found it surprising that we’d experienced a severe lack of enquiries, maybe we should take a ‘feature all’ setup??

Now that it’s established that it was an IT problem and not the agent, or the lack of spending a couple of thousand dollars a month extra the simnple fact is that no one will be able to tell for sure just how much REA’s stuff up has cost agents, owners, buyers and landlords. Certainly REA should be coming up with an ‘across the board’ solution before everyone becomes totally dismayed with them but I won’t be holding my breath. Some advice for Shane Dale at myhome, make sure your email servers stay up!

An earlier post I made resulted in someone suggesting that REA had no idea that the server was down and that they should invest in some monitoring software. All I can say is that our small business server 2003 tells me when a service stops and we’re just a real estate office. If a market leading website delivering email leads to agents doesn’t have some monitoring of it’s web services, where are the other holes in the system and when will they crash??

Your market monitor product is interesting… particularly the wording… reads like your company scrapes agents websites of listings (publicly available) to do comparative stats for your customers… ?

http://www.inhabit.com.au/am-MarketMonitor.htm

The title is rather ironic. From Wikipedia: Dramatic Irony is “when words and actions possess a significance that the listener or audience understands, but the speaker or character does not.”

Glenn