I went to the Toronto Real Estate Board’s annual general meeting today, mainly to check out the unveiling of Stratus’ new TMLS.
It was held downtown, at the beautiful Art Deco Allstream Centre at Exhibition Place. It was a nice change from fighting commuter traffic just to get out to a dingy hall near the airport, and they did a good job of cruising through the boring stuff, keeping time-wasting complaints to a minimum and getting to the main presentation quickly. I applaud Richard Silver for this.
That said, the coffee was still just as awful as always!
While the wait for the new Stratus has been a long and frustrating one, I think the general population of the membership will be really happy once they get to play with it. The crowd in attendance even applauded several of the new additions as they were introduced.
TREB has decided to run the two systems for a full year, so you will have lots of time to plan your retirement if you can’t handle this change.
As Leslie Keller from Stratus said at the end of her presentation, you aren’t going to lose any functions, only gain new ones.
The specific highlights that I liked are listed below:
- Customise default email message for prospects.
- Map Search – the biggest addition to searching; it will make life so much easier and almost erase the issues that the redistricting has caused.
- Quick Search has an auto count as you narrow down the criteria.
- Edit criteria in middle of search from a side tab.
- Save To Cart allows you to save listings for other clients and return later while you are finishing an existing search.
- Can print to PDF easily for presentations or iPad use.
- Cross-class searching! Not just condo or freehold!
- Search Maps by shapes. Save searches with no limits and no restrictions on shapes.
- Easily create a Favourite Listings list of up to 100 properties.
- Create office searches. Each Brokerage can create basic searches that are available to their agents.
- Add places of interest to the search maps. Schools, hospitals, etc…
- For Report Search you can enter MLS numbers without having to switch fields.
- Entire searches autosaved for 25 most recent searches.
- Recent views, 100 most recently viewed properties are autosaved.
- Open multi windows to run multi-searches at once.
Thanks to John Di Michelle, Leslie Keller, Richard Silver and all the folks who put together the meeting!