Return of the Stats

Three months is an eternity in the tech world. Three months ago there was no such thing as an iPhone 5, Microsoft was not selling tablets and Amazon wasn’t collecting sales tax in the state of Texas. As TMHA’s Director of Technology, it is my goal to bring that same velocity of change to the association by leveraging key trends from the current technological landscape. I would like to use this column going forward as a means to share with you where we have been and where we are going with all things tech.

In the last three months we have launched the new texasmha.com, completely replaced our office networking backbone, moved all critical member service tools and association telecom to the cloud, and by the time this column hits the press, released the first version of TMHA Stats. The launching of the stat service should mark the transition from our initial platform building efforts to a new phase of rapid releases of beneficial member services.

Having the right platform is a huge determining factor in the success of any long-term tech effort. The new website was built on top of an evolving content management system (CMS) that during our development cycle had a new version released. We were easily able to incorporate that update prior to go-live and as a benefit launched with more features than we expected. The developers of the CMS have announced their next release candidate, so in the very near future we will have the option to quickly upgrade the site once again with a broader feature set. This illustrates why software solutions are such tremendously valuable investments, they should continue to get better over time, and they can free up your resources to focus on delivering new core business value instead of wasting energy on infrastructure maintenance, keeping the lights on efforts or simple feature enhancement that should be delivered in an upcoming release of any platform worth its salt.

This brings us back to the new TMHA Stats service, and where we will be focusing our efforts in the coming months. I had the distinct pleasure of talking with many of you at convention, and the consensus winner for most requested deliverable from our tech team was getting the TDHCA monthly market reports back. Well I am very pleased to announce that with the help of Joe Garcia and Robert Flores from TDHCA we have built the pipeline to deliver all SOL data to TMHA and have stood up the first batch of reports from that data set.

The plan for the new stats service is to deliver all relevant market data through an online dashboard of reports to your computer, tablet or smartphone. After establishing the data feed from TDHCA, the first set of reports available are aggregate market sales figures outlining:

• The total sales of new and used single and multi-section homes for the year
• Personal and real property elections for new and used homes for the year
• And breakdowns on cash and credit purchases for new and used homes for the year with the different property type elections

With the aggregate reporting in place, the next batch of reports will focus on the geographical location of sales and installs throughout the state. It is our belief that by building valuable reporting on the metrics of the market we will not only empower you with meaningful tools to help you monitor and identify trends to base informed business decisions from, but that this effort will also serve the industry as a whole by giving us the ability to show particular governmental officials the potential impact of their policy decisions on the specific regions they most care about.

This is the type of core business value we are looking to provide in all of our efforts and a model for the type of projects we will continue to take on and build. Please take the time to visit the stats page to see them for yourself, and please let us know how we can improve them. If you have any ideas on additional reports and what new services would most help you to successfully operate your business here in the great state of Texas, please don’t hesitate to contact us. It’s been a great three months, I am very proud of our accomplishments and look forward to the road ahead.