Open Letter To Yahoo!, Google, Trulia, and Zillow, Encouraging Data Standards

January 2, 2008
By: David Harris
Author's Website: http://www.futureofrealty.com

As part of the newly elected Board of Directors of the Real Estate Standards Organization (RESO), I have accepted the challenge along with the other 9 Board members to construct a real estate data standard that can be beneficial for all parties involved: Agents, Brokers, MLSs, and the multitude of vendors serving all aspects.

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.

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Categories: Google, Listings Syndication, MLS, Trulia, Zillow

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Michael Price

“Adopting standards is the key for real estate agents, brokers, multiple listing services and service providers to take advantage of business-to-business opportunities on the Web,” he said. “If you wish to participate in Internet commerce, you must be XML-ready.”

That is a quote from 2000 Inman article (http://www.inman.com/inmannews.aspx?id=18123) by Doug Greenwood, one of the early architects of XML schemas for real estate data. I can remember working with Doug a year or two before that in an attempt to bring together enough participants to establish a listing standard. It seems so long ago. Matt Kelly might remember more than I do about it, he was there too. :)

I'm hopeful that the new efforts can finally show some progress toward an end that seems to be taking a painfully long time to reach. I'm not being a naysayer, I've just been away from the issue for a while. I am curious as to what the reasons are for the slow progress to this point and how they can be avoided going forward.

David Harris

Michael, thanks for commenting (and for signing up for some of the RETS workgroups!). As far as the slow progress is concerned and what is different now, I guess the easiest way to put it is "nothing drives innovation like competition".

With the liquidity of listing data that exists today, many MLS's are seeing a vast array of feature rich, innovative solutions appear in their marketplace that depend on their data, but not on their software. So how long will it be before these external systems become the "primary systems"?

Successful evolution and implementation of the RETS standard will ensure that the MLS remain in a central quality control role but still allow niche 3rd party service providers to address their market effectively.

Spencer Rascoff

Great idea. We hear you at Zillow.

In my prior career in online travel at Hotwire.com, I was on the board of directors of an organization called the Hotel Electronic Distribution Network Association (HEDNA). HEDNA's primary goal was to improve technological connectivity between hotel companies and their online distribution partners though the creation of common standards. The hard work that HEDNA did to standardize connectivity in the travel industry has saved hundreds of companies tens of millions of dollars, and has immeasurably benefited consumers as well. While I'm the first to point out the MANY differences between travel and real estate, the issue of connectivity challenges is one thing that we have in common. Zillow agrees that this is something that we can help fix, together.

Kurtis Holsapple

I would love for this to happen. I really think that it has to happen at the MLS level for it to be adopted as well, considering the amount of closed door business practice there is in the real estate business today. It's going to be an uphill battle.

Companies like Prudential that block their email servers from working with other real estate mail servers (Keller Williams) makes me think that some companies really don't want open standards at all. If they can get the advantage any way possible, they will. Best of luck to you and know that PlugMyListing.com will follow whatever standards are adopted.

Michael Price

Pete Flint of Trulia, David G of Zillow and Steve Shultz of Yahoo real estate have responded to the open letter over at Michael Wurzer's blog (FBS). http://www.flexmls.com/blog/?p=287

Glad to see the spirit of cooperation off to a good start.

MP