As we’ve reported in the past, Mac loving real estate agents in regions such as Colorado are being shunned by a new Internet based system that serves as a central listing database for properties.
The problem seems to be spreading. Scores of real estate agents who are Apple computer loyalists are fuming over the recent upgrade of their online real estate data service that has essentially shut them out, according to a Press Democrat (California) article.
“I don’t want to sound like a paranoid Mac-o-phile, but the fact remains that no one should be forced to use a specific platform and browser,” Trish McLean, a Century 21 Alliance agent who works in a Santa Rosa office with many Macs, told the newspaper.
The Bay Area Real Estate Information Service (which since 1998 has provided the online data for real estate listings in Sonoma, Napa, Mendocino, San Francisco, Marin, Solano and Contra Costa counties) has a new Web-based system that gives agents up-to-the-minute information on homes sales. That is, if those agents are using Wintel systems.
“Officials with the real estate information service said that while they are sympathetic to Mac users, only a small number of their 5,800 clients are affected,” the Press Democrat reports. “The service estimates that about 3 percent of its clients — or less than 200 people use Macs.”
Bay Area Real Estate Information Service board member George Gallegos said the situation was “unavoidable” because “Macs don’t work on any Web-based systems.” Stephen Henry, WebSig leader for NCMUG, the largest Macintosh users group north of the Golden Gate Bridge, said the situation is like “Intuit Quickbooks all over again.”
“I had to deal with that when Intuit stopped developing QuickBooks for the Mac,” he told MacCentral. “I tried for years to make it work under Virtual PC, but there were too many problems.”
To prove that Web applications do work with the Mac, and contrary to the opinion stated in the Press Democrat article, Henry said Orcale has produced NetLeder as an accounting ASP and “it works just fine with a Mac.”