Matt Cohen – Posted “MLS and the Future of Listing Distribution” way back in the ancient days of 2007. Matt highlights some of the key issues around listing/content distribution that brokers and MLS’s need to consider. Most of his comments have a protectionist slant and are commingled with some self promotion.

Brian Larson also hits many of the same issues with his white paper “Tales of an Industry Lost at Sea” from May, 2008. He paints the MLS actions in a reactionary light, acting more on a “me too” strategy instead of a coherently thought through one (that would obviously benefit from his firms’ consulting services).

Saul Klein takes a more holistic approach to the MLS future. He does a good job of summarizing so many of the issues facing MLS’s including listing syndication, sold data, security, public services, transaction management, agent ratings, etc. (including a glancing blow at “social networking”). His article seems to ramble on these issues with 3 or 4 cleverly inserted plugs for Point2 and RealTown, but doesn’t really offer anything new except calling MLS influencers “to action” who haven’t acted yet.

Greg Swann gets his undergarments in a wad in uncovering a secret collusion between Saul and NAR to promote the “National Real Estate Library / Archive“. I frankly don’t give them that much credit. His focus on the “single point of entry” statement is incorrect. I read it as single point of entry for “each agent” versus each agent going to many sites and cutting and pasting. Not a national point of entry (unless you take Saul’s title literally “The” MLS of the future… in singular)

Mike Wurzer is my brother-in-arms when it comes to promoting THE common standard known as RETS as a key piece in the MLS’s future. In fact, the NAR MLS Policy Committee expects the MLS’s to have RETS as a part of their system by June 2009.

Ok, ok, ok, so enough with the roll call and get to the “Elephant in the Room” comment, right? Well, here goes….

The internet is the most competitive environment in the planet for what… your eyeballs.

Listing data will be a commodity (if it isn’t already). Not saying it isn’t necessary, just putting it in the class of tap water and electricity, everyone will have it but life would still suck without it.

The “MLS” exists for the benefit of its dues paying members, drifting from that core concept will get you confused with the Zillow / Trulia gang (an exciting party until the money runs out).

And those dues paying members want what? To make more money faster by using the MLS. And if you look at it from that perspective, almost everything from listing data quality, system security/reliability, IDX, etc either play to the speed or value aspect.

But what kills me is that the typical MLS system takes the most “social” species on earth, the Realtor, and puts them in a virtual sound proof, solid walled cube the moment they log into the MLS. The number of agents that login to the MLS at least once a day is dramatic; Facebook/LinkedIn/Etc spend millions to try and achieve the “stickiness” that the MLS has enjoyed since day one. Mike posted a story about some “MLS Juice” that his blog got from a one time link from the homepage of the FlexMLS system.

Does no one else really see the power of allowing these users to interact in meaningful ways “within” the MLS (and yes, I know about reverse prospecting… but is that all ya got?) I will post a few ideas here just to illustrate what I am talking about:

1. Imagine the listing agent setting their “status” to online within the MLS so that agents looking at their listing (possibly with a prospect) can jot a quick note to them and get a question answered on the spot.
2. Imagine being able to review search criteria by time frame/ geographic area / etc. so that as you are working with a listing you can let your owner know what is hot and what is not, and who is getting the most “juice”.
3. How about being able to “watch” your competition and see how much “traffic-share” you have against them and compare the number of times your listing is “saved” versus theirs, etc. Almost like doing SEO within the MLS.

To me, this is what the “next generation” MLS system will do: mine its treasure chest of usage activity and present it to the membership in ways that will make them more productive and profitable.

Philadelphia, April 11, 2008 – Members of the Real Estate Standards Organization (RESO), including the National Association of Realtors® and other industry leaders, have approved a draft standardized data format for distributing real estate listing information.

The Real Estate Transaction Standard (RETS), an industry effort initiated by NAR and maintained by RESO, simplifies the process of sending real estate information by allowing brokers and MLSs to send their listing data to multiple real estate advertising Web sites without dealing with different data formats.

The standard was drafted and approved by a RESO working group composed of NAR’s Center for REALTOR® Technology and many of the real estate industry’s leading publishers and consumers of real estate listing data. They include MLS Assistant, MLS Listings Inc., MLSPIN, New Jersey MLS, TREND MLS, Move Inc. (operator of Realtor.com®), Bridge Interactive, Bainbridge, Cevado Technologies, CLRsearch, eNeighborhoods, eShowings, FBS Data Systems, Google, Homescape, Marketlinx, Oodle, Point2, PropBot, Prudential Preferred CRE, RealEstate.com, Realtracs, ThreeWide, Trulia, Vast, Yahoo! and Zillow.

The partnership of MLSs, vendors and real estate brokers came together to develop the standardized data format because they understand the business and technology needs of Realtors® today and their desire to get property information to home buyers faster and more efficiently.

The draft standard will be implemented immediately by several of the partner organizations. Following their feedback, a final draft will be presented and voted on during a meeting of the partners in August.

“Realtors® are industry innovators and understand that more consumers than ever are seeking real estate information online,” said Mark Lesswing, NAR chief technology officer and senior vice president. “By collaborating with our RESO partners to standardize the data formats, we are making it easier for Realtors® to feed their clients’ property listings to multiple real estate sites in one format, saving them time and money.”

One item that hasn’t been widely reported before now is the recommendation that RESO has made on which “version” of RETS should be applied to address the following statement from the NAR MLS Policy Committee:

In order to ensure that the goal of maintaining any orderly marketplace is maintained, and to further establish REALTOR® information as the trusted data source, MLS organizations owned and operated by associations of REALTOR® will comply with the RETS standards by June 2009, and keep current with the standard’s new versions by implementing new releases of RETS within one year of ratification.

The Board of Directors of RESO has composed the following statement in response:

RESO announces that version 1.7.1 has been chosen as the minimum RETS version that will be site certified to satisfy the MLS committee policy deadline of June 2009

Version 1.7.1 is version 1.7 with minor edits to correct some errors and omissions. RESO also recommends to meet the spirit of the NAR MLS Policy each MLS implementation of RETS should be tested for compliance, not just the generic release hosted by the vendor.

Check it and see if you are plotted.

Inman Connect New York

Twitters

Bill Wendel

Beer-with-Bloggers

Around the 45 second point of this video, this picture was taken by Jeff Turner

And the video being shot by Rudy Bachraty of Sellsius that appears in the zebra video is posted here:

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.wellcomemat.com/wm/v/c/s/lg/p/6219/t/p/img/x/v/x" height="348" width="400" /]

Jay Thompson of PhoenixRealEstateGuy.com pointed me to a video by Rachel Natalie Klein

http://intothebox.tv/archive/?id=110

And the flash you see around 53 seconds into this video was this photo from Jeff Turner:

So this is what happens when you get a bunch of uber-documentarians together for one event. What’s next? Live streaming videocast from the event in real time… we will see in San Francisco I guess.

Michael Wurzer, President of FBS Systems and the elected Chairman of the RESO Board, has issued this open letter to Yahoo!, Google, Trulia, and Zillow (and any others) to encourage cooperation with RESO in coming up with the future of real estate data standards.

I encourage everyone to read the full letter and comment on Mike’s Blog, but here are some key excerpts:

By focusing on a standardized data format together, we can make it easier for brokers who want to send their listings to your site to do so without duplicate data entry and extra expense in dealing with different data formats for each of your sites.

The reason I recommend the Real Estate Transaction Standard to you is that the RETS community has already worked hard over the last few years developing detailed schema for listing and property information that can be leveraged to solve this problem quickly.

Further evidence of the energy surrounding RETS is the recent adoption by the NAR MLS Committee of a new policy requiring all MLSs to adopt RETS by June 2009. As mentioned above, the vast majority of MLSs already support RETS and this new MLS policy, combined with your adoption, will help ensure that the most efficient data standards are both developed and adopted across the industry, which, of course, is the purpose of a standard.

Again, RESO wants to stress that this your data standard, not someone else’s. If you have an interesting business use case or issue that you would like for us to take into consideration, please feel free to email to me at david-at-futureofrealty-dot-com, leave a comment, or better yet, join one of our workgroups and contribute directly.