Lower pricing/renewal structure: Feedback

[dbiggers]

I'm thrilled to read this thread today, as my renewal with Alamode is up and I've been considering many things.... My present annual renewal is around $1,400, and I additionally pay $350 in a few months to cover my son, the trainee... I have no idea how I got here, and nobody wants to lose options because they choose the wrong pricing plan...

I had no idea that Mercury didn't require the xSite... I had no idea plugins would work without the xSite either.. Somehow, that has never been communicated with me...

It would be very helpful, if my option screen for renewal, would show the costs of all the options available, rather than just what I have... The salespeople that call are wonderful folks, but often talk in pricing versus needs...

I'm literally sick of spending $1,750 for my software, and I've been flirting with other companies with the intent of making a move... Telling me that "you get what you pay for" or "we do things nobody else does" or "they charge you more in the long run" have been said many times... I've been with Alamode since the DOS days in 1992, and I'm just sick at the thought about changing vendors... I've seen my package with the bells and whistles go from $900 to $1,400 since 2008 which have been the toughest years of most appraisal companies.... It would be very helpful to actually know what comes with this long list of components in addition to the silver, gold, platinum thing....

This thread is very enlightening to me.... I suppose I need to dig a little deeper first...

CE is not something I'm interested in... Most of us who are members of a professional organization, get our CE through them....

Thanks again for the thread... Perhaps there is hope yet...

Dale, we just rolled out the Mercury changes recently, but as an Elite, you already have the XSites and the paid plugins. The plugins used to be the "XSite Order Manager", which goes way back to almost a decade ago when appraisers complained about Mercury, and we rolled the plugins into XSites and kept the appraiser's own brand front-and-center instead of having Mercury between them and the client. After HVCC, that of course had to reverse, so we flipped it back over to Mercury but never decoupled the XSites part. But, even now, Mercury still charges for the extra plugins and at about the same fee. So, Mercury is free if the only plugin you use is the Mercury basic plugin. If you work with the AMCs or lenders who require a custom plugin, or AppraisalPort which also requires a plugin, then you wind up paying for the plugins either way. There's not much we can do on that front.

As for your other costs, don't pay for anything you don't use! If you have parts of Elite that you don't use, downgrade and get rid of them.

On the other hand, you should also look at the things that you might be overlooking to make extra money inside Elite. XSellerate is a good example. Appraisers who use it in conjunction with their XSite and who target non-lenders, and who follow our marketing advice (we have e-books, seminars, webinars, etc. on marketing that appraisers should do), indeed make much more money. There was an appraiser in Dallas the other day who told us that he grew to a five-man shop and is doing phenomenally well even in the downturn by simply doing nothing but following our marketing and sales advice. It works. We're good at marketing and we know this business. Use our skills for your own benefit and we both win.

So, I'm not going to give you bland advice like "you get so much more", even if it's true. That rings hollow, if you goal is to reduce costs. Call us after deciding what you want to jettison, and get your package down to what you want to spend. We'd rather keep you even if you spend less, than let you leave. It just makes sense.

I will however say that some parts of Elite, like XSellerate, need to be used not as "expenses" but as "investments", and those investments are only as lucrative as you make them. If you don't want to spend time on them, then they're bad investments for you and you should get rid of them. If you spend time with them and really use them, they can change your business.

It's up to you. Pick your path and then **make** us do what you decide. Don't get talked into something more by a salesperson. And you can always refer them to this post. ;-)

Hope this helps. Hang in there during this slowdown, and look for every way you can make extra money. I've been there myself in my early days, when I worked as an appraiser during the oil boom in Oklahoma -- and then the oil bust. The office phone went silent. It's nerve wracking. But finally, getting proactive turned it around for our shop (my dad and me).

 

[Dale Floyd]

Thank you Dave.... I really appreciate the call from Wes this morning....

I'm going to wait until after 12/1, which runs up against my expiration date... I'll look at the offer then, and I'll give Wes a call back one way or the other...

Customer service is something that has gotten lost in much of America today... Getting a call like that, is really refreshing....

 

[Deleted member 128537]

CE on line would be great. I take almost all my CE that way. I don't like sitting in class all day, and most of the time it means driving an hour or two to class.

Also for those not getting any traffic to your website you really need to upgrade to the highest one and then customize as much as possible. You also need to work it so that when people search you come up on at least the first 10. I get good traffic to my site. And I could even work on it more than I do. In fact just got an order yesterday from a private party. Also one lady said, "I ordered from you because your web site looked the best." It makes a difference.

 

[JSmith43]

For a few years now I've paid for at least 2 software packages each year because I like back-up plans & variety.

The $349/year will probably mean I'll have T 2013 as one of them. I'm pretty sure I could operate it quickly since I used T 2010 back when the bugs were getting ironed out

I assume it still imports Bradford files & preferences, right?

 

[dbiggers]

For a few years now I've paid for at least 2 software packages each year because I like back-up plans & variety.

The $349/year will probably mean I'll have T 2013 as one of them. I'm pretty sure I could operate it quickly since I used T 2010 back when the bugs were getting ironed out

I assume it still imports Bradford files & preferences, right?

Good to hear! Yes, it converts Bradford files and many more.

We've also improved the importing of ACI databases, standard comments, and so on. ACI report files are still encrypted, but users can import the UAD XML files, so that's less of a stumbling block now than it was in the past.

 

[Joe-NC]

Honestly, I've never understood how they get away with charging for maps.

So if I buy Total 2013, and I don't renew my membership next year, you'll still let me import maps automatically into my reports even after my membership has expired?

What I don't like is that you sell "support memberships". I don't want or need support. If someone needs you to hold their hand and show them how to use the software ...great, a support membership is just what they need. But if the problem is because your software has bugs (i.e. the text editor and sketch program don't work properly, etc) that kind of support should be included in the price of the software. If that requires a yearly payment, then you're just charging rent on your software like other companies do. So just say that. Don't call it a "support membership". (unless by "support" you mean that we are financially supporting YOU, which would be completely honest and acceptable).

I guess what I mean is that if you can't just admit you're charging a subscription for the software, its harder for me to trust you.

Any time, effort, or money you would spend on CE classes, I would rather you put that focus on the meat and potatoes of the software! Flood maps are not a big deal. Having the info and maps automatically imported into the report saves only a trivial amount of time. Importing info from the MLS would save us more time. Not just the comps, but the subject info as well. Give us a plugin that imports 50 comps, adds them to the 1004MC, runs regression on them, draws graphs, and helps us support our adjustments.

 

[dbiggers]

So if I buy Total 2013, and I don't renew my membership next year, you'll still let me import maps automatically into my reports even after my membership has expired?

What I don't like is that you sell "support memberships". I don't want or need support. If someone needs you to hold their hand and show them how to use the software ...great, a support membership is just what they need. But if the problem is because your software has bugs (i.e. the text editor and sketch program don't work properly, etc) that kind of support should be included in the price of the software. If that requires a yearly payment, then you're just charging rent on your software like other companies do. So just say that. Don't call it a "support membership". (unless by "support" you mean that we are financially supporting YOU, which would be completely honest and acceptable).

I guess what I mean is that if you can't just admit you're charging a subscription for the software, its harder for me to trust you.

Any time, effort, or money you would spend on CE classes, I would rather you put that focus on the meat and potatoes of the software! Flood maps are not a big deal. Having the info and maps automatically imported into the report saves only a trivial amount of time. Importing info from the MLS would save us more time. Not just the comps, but the subject info as well. Give us a plugin that imports 50 comps, adds them to the 1004MC, runs regression on them, draws graphs, and helps us support our adjustments.

Thanks for the feedback, and I think we're addressing what you're raising here, already.

What your comments boil down to, I think, is that you want to see improvements where they matter on a day to day basis. What may seem sexy to a software company isn't always so to someone who's doing the daily grind crunching numbers and pulling data from dozens of sources. You'll have to trust me when I say that we get it. We're doing a lot of work to address exactly that. You've seen many updates lately on that front and a ton are queueing up for the future. Now, to address some of your concerns:

Note that I said we're looking at rolling out new "structure", not just a new price. The names will change, how it's being positioned and described will change, and so on. Don't get hung up on the semantics just yet. This is a trial balloon. When you're talking about change, it's always more effective to describe new things in terms of existing things that people understand, and "support and update memberships" like our current Silver is a term every appraiser understands currently.

I could have more accurately said "We're moving toward multi-tennant hosted applications combined with desktop components delivered in an annual recurring SaaS subscription model", and nobody would have known what I was talking about. That's exactly how we describe it internally. But that's no use in this case when asking for feedback.

And yes, this whole plan will take the form of new names and new descriptions starting early next year. That's why we're gathering feedback now. It won't be called Silver. It may not even be called TOTAL for all I know. And the whole thing will be very clearly an annual subscription.

As for 1004MCs, that works right now. We just released the Worksheets PV with a built-in 1004MC feature. Copy and paste your MLS text file into it and it does it all automatically. We rolled that out last week. (But it does much more than just 1004MCs. In my opinion, the power of having Excel essentially built in to the forms engine, pushing and pulling data in real time, takes TOTAL and Aurora far beyond any other appraisal solution. Those who've used worksheets for years inside Aurora will tell you it's a game-changer.)

As for comps importing on a grander scale (not just grid-import, and not just 1004MC, but full, live, MLS real-time integration and analytics), we've been working steadily on that for over a year and now have a full RETS-compatible MLS data interface up and running along with a public records and augmentation initiative coming to fruition. If you look at our agent product called RE:Focus (from which the RETS MLS integration comes), you'll see how extensive we're talking about. You get real time access to all historical and current listings, expireds, sales, and other off-market data, with analytics. Take the RE:Focus features you see and imagine those tweaked for appraisers' needs, and you've got our next generation Comps/Spectrum app. The reason agent came first is that MLSs won't give off-market data away to us unless we show them the benefit to agents. As you might expect, they don't really care about appraisers. We can bypass that with MLS importing from text files, but that loses photos and other data obviously.

We have over 50 people in our development department. They're working on tons of new things as well as continuous bug fixes (as is the case with any program), and we have a "core stability" team holed up in a "war room" as we speak, for three months straight, making incredible stability improvements to the engine's ability to handle multi-threaded conflicts in particular. Talk to our betas and they'll tell you the dramatic improvements, or to users on here with both Aurora and TOTAL who've seen core issues disappear just in the last couple of updates due to that team's work.

You mention sketching, and we recently assigned extra developers dedicated to sketching improvements for the next 12 months, non-stop. The changes are rolling out across mobile (iPad, iPhone, and Android) and desktop, with a host of fixes as well as major new features (layers so you can clone levels and trace over them, sketching over an aerial, etc.). After 12 months of this sort of effort, you won't recognize the current sketcher. Updates are scheduled for every month, with an eye toward very practical improvements.

Running a CE division as a separate business unit doesn't affect developers, just FYI. It doesn't take resources away from coding -- in fact, by making our overall solution more compelling, it adds to the income and therefore adds to the projects we can take on and the developers we can hire. As I explained above with agent, it's a classic example of how appraisers benefit from other areas, because one project funds another. More people using us due to free CE means more money and more developers adding and updating the things you need.

Hope this helps. Thanks for the info and I hope you keep looking at us with an open mind. We're on your side, and we really do care about hammering away at the small-but-numerous headaches that plague an appraiser all day.

 

[Randolph Kinney]

+1 For Sketcher Improvements

+ Worksheets Integration

+ Rets MLS Integration

 

[Pat Butler]

I must say, you guys did a great job of bug fixes on the last release. It was obvious that you had people really working overtime to address all the issues in a very short period of time. I'm sure you were relieved when the complaints died down after a few weeks.

 

[dbiggers]

I must say, you guys did a great job of bug fixes on the last release. It was obvious that you had people really working overtime to address all the issues in a very short period of time. I'm sure you were relieved when the complaints died down after a few weeks.

Thanks Pat! There's a lot more on the way. Real low-level stuff.

As for complaints, there's a rule of thumb... Knock out the top 10 items and there's always a new top 10 below that. It's just a fact of life if you develop software! Lol. The calls never decrease.