Daily Real Estate News  |  April 14, 2008  |   Industry Group Agrees on Listing Standards
The NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF REALTORSŪ and other industry members of the Real Estate Standards Organization (RESO) have unanimously approved a standard format for distributing real estate listing information.

RESO is a nonprofit corporation — made up of MLSs, vendors, brokers, and NAR — that supports the common business interests of the real estate industry. One of its top concerns has been creating a standard format for real estate listing data.

The solution, known as Real Estate Transaction Standard, simplifies the process of sending real estate information by allowing brokers and MLSs to send their data to multiple real estate advertising Web sites without dealing with different data formats.

“REALTORSŪ 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 RealtorsŪ to feed their clients’ property listings to multiple real estate sites in one format, saving them time and money.”

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

This standard was drafted and unanimously approved by a RESO working group that includes NAR’s Center for REALTORŪ Technology and many of the real estate industry’s leading publishers and consumers of real estate listing data: MLS Assistant, MLS Listings Inc., MLSPIN, New Jersey MLS, TREND MLS, Move Inc., 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.

Visit REALTOR.org to learn more about Real Estate Transaction Standards.

— REALTORŪ Magazine Online