Notorious R.O.B.

Now, this is good news from NAR:

The integrity of data is a foundation to the orderly Real Estate market. The Real Estate Transaction Standards (RETS) provides a vendor neutral, secure approach to exchanging listing information between the broker and the MLS. In order to ensure that the goal of maintaining an 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 from ratification.

So, by June of 2009, all MLS operated by Realtor associations will be RETS compliant.

Currently, only 63% of MLSes are RETS compliant.

If you’re a betting man, here’s an interesting wager.

Which standard will see 90% adoption by brokerage companies first?

(a) RETS

(b) Yahoo!/Trulia/Zillow standard

Now, do keep in mind that being “RETS-compliant” is still being worked out:

What it literally means, well that is still being defined. The RESO Certification Workgroup has been busy identifying what being a Compliant MLS means. Such as, the tests that the vendors need to pass to be a compliant product, and the tests/criteria that must be met to be a certified-compliant site (MLS). There will probably be much discussion regarding all this during the April 2008 RETS meeting in Philadelphia.

Not sure if Yahoo! et. al. have published what being “Yahoo! compliant” might mean.  Presumably, if you use their standard to publish and share listings data, that makes you Yahoo! compliant.  But who knows?

So… place yer bets!

And all you folks in commercial real estate… please accept my condolences for the state of data exchange in your industry.

-rsh

I know this is probably old news by now, but I confess that I just found out about it myself.

Apparently, the real estate industry has a new standard data format for the distribution of real estate listings online.  Seems the boys at Yahoo!, Zillow.com, and Trulia.com have gotten together and worked out a new format.  Seems that they have at least one significant fan, one Mr. Craig Cuyar, Chief Information Officer, of Realogy Franchise Group.  Happy days are here!

But… I thought we already had a standard data format for the distribution of listings?

So does one Michael Wurzer, chairman of the Real Estate Standards Organization, as expressed in an open letter to Yahoo!, Google, Zillow, Trulia, et. al.

My purpose in writing is to encourage all of you to join together with the real estate community in supporting the Real Estate Transaction Standard (”RETS”). 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. We also can increase the accuracy and timeliness of the data being maintained on 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. The schema has been and continues to be developed with input from a broad cross-section of real estate brokers, franchises, associations, and their technology partners, including MLS vendors, IDX vendors, transaction management and electronic forms vendors, and others. This vibrant community also welcomes your input as to how the schema can be adopted to your particular needs, such as providing a lighter payload like IDX . The RESO Board also recently chartered a new Transport Work Group to allow the new schema to be integrated into the already widely-deployed RETS 1.x systems and to create a new RESTful RETS implementation. The RETS community would welcome your participation in these and other efforts.

Let me get some popcorn.  This is about to get interesting.

I will point out one thing, however.

Apparently, it took three non-real estate Web companies about… oh, a weekend of work to get done what it took the real-estate community “hard work over the past few years” to get not-quite-done.

At issue is the Will to Change.  The webbies have it; the realtors do not.

I wonder why that is….

-rsh