Each quarter, Texas REALTORS® highlights the staff in one of the association’s departments.

Technology touches almost every aspect of our professional lives. The seven members of the Technology Department keep Texas REALTORS® processes and equipment running smoothly.

“It’s an amazing group of people who can find creative solutions while having disparate skillsets,” Technology Director Pat Wimberly says. “The magic in our team is how we can pool those skills to build and deliver the tools that help members and staff do their jobs better.”

Most recently, the department is helping members and staff access resources remotely during the coronavirus pandemic. Careful planning and new technologies have allowed Texas REALTORS® to continue serving members from home.

The Technology Department tracks roughly 1,300 tickets a year through its Help Desk platform, Technology Operations Manager Landon Hobson says. Those tickets range from changing passwords to suggestions that become tens of thousands of lines of custom code later.

The department has written and developed approximately 60 web applications to help staff and members. Those include such popular tools as the live Legal Hotline call management interface, apps dashboard, membership engagement tool, and the Course Administration Reporting Tool (CART). The department supports every product it builds. It also maintains webpages and databases, and extracts data.

The department is very close-knit and collaborative, although that may not be obvious to visitors to its first-floor offices.

“People come down and we usually have the lights off, and everyone has their headphones on. It seems like we’re all in our own little worlds,” says Neil Paveling, software developer and technology integration coordinator. “But I think that’s just a first impression you would get, because we are usually pretty lively down there and pretty social with one another.”

Customer service matters a great deal to the Technology Department.

“We really do enjoy working in our positions and doing what we do,” Landon Hobson says. “Any and all feedback, positive and negative, we use. We want to create services that allow our staff and REALTORS® to do their jobs to the best of their ability, to be more efficient. We love streamlining anything we can. That’s one of our missions: to make the staff’s job easier through automation.”

The Technology Department comprises: Pat Wimberly, technology director; Joshua Hobson, senior software developer; Landon Hobson, technology operations manager; Neil Paveling, software developer and technology integration coordinator; Andrew Miculka, software developer; Shawn Yap, software developer; and Quinn Neal, infrastructure support specialist.