Revolution Readies For National Rollout

Tim Lee attended the National Association of Realtors Conference in Orlando, Fla., last year, and if he did nothing else, he listened.

Lee asked Realtors what kind of multiple listing service they would like in a perfect world. Three months ago, it would have taken him years to make those suggestions a reality.

But since merging his company, Net Design, into 30-employee VeriSource Inc. in November, Lee said it’s only a matter of time before the surviving Revolution Technologies LLC can make it all happen.

“Revolution gets to draw on his customer base and his experience and he gets to draw on our experience and our horse power,” said Chad Hinton, VeriSource’s chief technology officer.

The VeriSource principals have equity in Revolution, along with Lee, who is a majority stockholder and active president for the new venture. VeriSource principal investors include Terry Johnson, VeriSource’s chief financial officer, Chris Maddox, its CEO, Don Goff, its chief operating officer and Hinton.

Lee said he expects the new company to have a return on its investment a year from now. He plans to attend the 2005 Realtors conference in San Francisco with more than flowers in his hair. He plans to have a few MLS contracts under his belt.

VeriSource has the expertise to back him up.

Almost all of VeriSource’s employees came from Fortune 500 companies and have experience in rolling out applications from states to foreign countries, Maddox said.

“We can design, build and maintain for all of their remote support,” Maddox said. “It’s kind of we’ve been there and done that, several of us, many times.”

Maddox said the infrastructure costs of the new company are virtually nil.

“If we were starting completely from scratch, we’d have to spend a bunch of money to get the space up and going. But because of what VeriSource brings to the table, we already host dozens and dozens of high-profile Web sites,” Maddox said.

Lee brings about 90 percent of his client base (real estate-based) and his real estate expertise to the new company.

“I’ve grown by the fact I now have eight software engineers, and the horsepower, money and IT experience of a level that can make my vision a reality,” Lee said. “So that is leaps and bounds growth from an office of three.”

Lee’s unique Internet data exchange (IDX) systems give house hunters — and the Realtors who serve them — the sector’s equivalent of X-ray vision via a sophisticated network of market information. For the past three years, he has been working on another program, targeted toward users of the multiple listing service called “MLSolution.”

The group is courting the Northwest Arkansas Multiple Listing Service, an entity whose database contract is up for renewal in July. The local MLS has more than 1,700 subscribers and would connect the separate Rogers board MLS to the Fayetteville-Springdale, Bentonville-Bella Vista and Siloam Springs boards of Realtors, Lee said. If Revolution got the MLS contract, it would charge from $10 to $15 per user, per month.

Revolution will present to the board in February, along with two other out-of-state bidders. Lee said the board is supposed to make the decision within the month.

The user-friendly MLS program he’s developed uses Microsoft Sequel Servers (SQL). It comes equipped with a primary Web-based application so that system upgrades are made automatically when a user logs on. It also has a distributed version so a Realtor working with clients can run the program on a laptop without an Internet connection and access the MLS database.