Partner Update: HomeRentals.net Status and Changes

Partners of HomeRentals.net:

Over the past couple of months, a lot has gone on. There are some very important updates we need to provide you with, and some stuff you've probably been wondering about.

1. The Past Two Months
2. January 1st, and HERO PM
3. Changes Coming with Listing Partners

1. The Past Two Months
   
   On November 12th, after a very busy fall conference season, we began experiencing serious performance degradation across many of our primary systems. After scrambling to find a resolution, we determined that our members would be best served by a system-wide upgrade. We already had this in the works, and partially staged, expecting to begin in 2009. Fate (or computer demons) forced us to re-prioritize and move much faster than we planned.
   
   We broke the upgrade into two sections, the first addressing the public-facing side of our business (prospects and clients of our members), and second addressing the software-as-a-service and our own member services systems, the private side. We successfully rolled out the public side between November 20th and December 16th. If you use the integrated partner option for listing search and display, you likely saw the updates to the listing details pages and experienced the increased speed of the new platform. This upgrade also included the newest version of our listing statistics and inquiries API, which we will discuss further down in this message.
   
   The second part of the upgrade was not as smooth. We began staging this in concert with the public upgrade, moving in earnest starting December 16th, with the expectation of completion January 1st. We extended our upgrade window to January 5th, but did not actually complete all components of the upgrade until January 9th. In that timeframe, certain functions had limited functionality, including our internal email. Until the 9th of January, we were actually handling some portions of our incoming email by shared spreadsheet, so responses were slow. Some of you may still be waiting for responses from messages, and we appreciate your patience.
   
   We have now completed the entire infrastructure and application upgrade. However, certain back-end functions, including partner exports, are still operating on the old infrastructure awaiting the move to our new systems – more on that below.
   
   
2. January 1st, and HERO PM
   
   On January 1st, we announced an exciting change that had been in the works for a long time. We have officially changed our company name from HomeRentals.net to HERO PM. This name change reflects our operational mission and alleviates some industry confusion. It is our hope that property managers will no longer see us as a network of home rentals, but as a provider of high efficiency rental office solutions to the property management industry. We will continue to operate the HomeRentals.net website as a listings website for our members, but all of our business to business services fall under the HERO banner. Over the next year, we will phase out references to HomeRentals.net replacing them with our new name and logo.
   
   
3. Changes Coming with Listing Partners
   
   There are four major changes that we need to outline for you, as a listing partner.
   
   
   1. Partner resource website. We are putting together a website at http://Partners.HEROPM.com. This site will contain various resources and status information that may be of interest to you. This site should be fully online within the next month.
      
      
   2. Upgrade of the platform for listing exports. Over the next month or so, we will be moving all listing exports off the current platform, moving them to the new HERO platform. For some of you, who receive feeds by FTP, this may result in no change. For others, you will have a new place to go to collect your feed file. We will work with you individually to schedule this cutover.
      
      The upgraded platform will also support real time queries and rapid updates. For those of you equipped and anxious to query listing details, availability, or status in real time, the new platform makes this easy. For others seeking a full feed periodically throughout the day, the new platform paves the way for this, too. We are currently working on full documentation for this, and will make it available to you when it's ready.
      
      
   3. Introduction of the open partner API. Our new API allows you to easily notify us of activity on listings that we source. Many of our members complain that they cannot easily see the benefit of a specific partner site. With the new API, statistics on views and inquiries in a partner site can show up on a property manager's consolidated HERO PM statistics. This allows these property managers to view, at a glance, where their listing views are coming from, and report this back to their owners through the HERO PM marketing report. Undoubtedly, this will lead property managers, and their owners, to feel better about the websites they are exporting to.
      
      As a benefit to property managers, you can also use the API to send full details from an incoming inquiry. This allows the leasing agent or manager to consolidate and handle all their leads through the HERO PM lead management system. The source of the inquiry (I.e. You) will be clear, so that a user will know exactly where their leads are coming from – even more so than when they try to manage them in a hodge-podge email environment.
      
      
   4. New feed status reporting. Some of you are currently sending feed status reports, including failures, successes, problems, etc. We are working on an automated method to parse these reports and include them along with a member's listing reports, so they will know immediately if a listing was properly fed, received, and processed by a partner. Both us and you are spending way too much time trying to help our users resolve problems with listings stuck in Neverland. Most of these problems are user error, but we currently do not consolidate the data to make it easy for the user to determine this. With this new option, we expect to almost eliminate the questions about whether a listing was properly fed/exported and received/imported by a partner. We will have full documentation on this once it is fleshed out.

   Again, we are currently running all partner feeds on a combination of our old and new infrastructure, so the changes above are not yet ready for you to take action on. We will be in contact with you individually when we are ready to move forward.

   If you have any questions, please let us know. If you're still waiting on a reply to a message you sent during our upgrade period, we don't mind a reminder, it might help us connect more quickly.

   We look forward to much shared success in 2009 and the future.

   Best Regards,

   Mike Anderson
   CDO
   RealEIS, LLC