During the 2022 RESO Fall Conference, RESO CEO Sam DeBord provided a RESO end-of-year update to more than 400 onsite and livestream participants ahead of a week of presentations, networking and active effort toward resolving real estate’s toughest tech problems.
Setting the Tone: Competition and Collaboration as a Community
RESO members are often in competition with each other, but while wearing their RESO Standards hats, their collective focus is entirely on working together to break down the barriers that make entering and working in the real estate industry difficult, particularly from a technology perspective.
We believe in the adage that a rising tide floats all boats. When we create meaningful standards from the complaints we receive directly to our faces at RESO conferences, we make the industry better. There is a reason why the “Pain Points” session is a regular part of our events. Those talking points are fed directly into our workgroup agendas.
RESO represents more than 100 technology companies, more than 500 MLSs, more than 1,000 associations, more than 35,000 brokerages and more than 1.7 million professionals, not to mention the millions of consumers who take part in real estate transactions.
Our initiatives take years to develop, because what we work on needs input, analysis and consensus from many different stakeholder groups. It takes great effort to get an entire industry to change its legacy practices. However, some important causes are pulled together within weeks, and we’ll begin there.
Hurricane Relief Donations
During our fall conference, we were proud to announce that RESO’s members, in conjunction with Stellar MLS, raised more than $90,000 for the REALTORS® Relief Foundation and Florida Realtors® Disaster Relief Fund. Lead donors were Triangle MLS, Heartland MLS and Homes.com, but every dollar from every individual contributor mattered.
Web API Transition Update
Getting organizations to switch from RETS to the RESO Web API as the primary method of data transfer is a hefty undertaking. After years of guiding the industry in this direction, it is catching fire.
We were able to share welcome news about the RESO Web API. Almost all MLSs have RESO Web API services, but moving customers off of the old RETS data feeds has taken time. That said, utilization of the RESO Web API standard has skyrocketed to more than 30% of the industry’s subscribers in the last 18 months.
Nearly half of the industry’s MLSs have committed their organizations to fully converting their data customers to Web API feeds.
We recently sent a two-question survey to all MLS members for a Web API transition update. We hope that you will take the time to give us periodic updates when we ask for them until you achieve 100%. If your organization has begun the RETS-to-API conversion process, let us know at certification@reso.org so we can recognize your leadership.
RESO Analytics
One of the most important developments in recent RESO certification history is the creation of RESO Analytics, a platform that now allows us to produce in-depth certification reports for all certified organizations for public consumption at certification.reso.org.
Past RESO certifications were reported simply as pass or fail. RESO Analytics publishes reports on the metadata, standard resources and fields, custom local fields, data availability, and server performance of certified systems.
The transparency that this new platform offers is unprecedented for RESO, and we hear about how wonderful this is from data consumers every day. RESO Analytics ushers in an era of data-driven decision making.
Many sister products to RESO Analytics are being created in 2023 to help boards and executive teams make stronger decisions about their data. These products include an industry aggregates service on the Data Dictionary Wiki; alignment reports for data providers, data consumers and the market in general; and an enhanced automated certification testing user interface.
You will hear more about new and revamped RESO products in workgroup meetings, at future conferences and in RESO marketing efforts.
RESO Certification
Getting endorsements listed in RESO Analytics occurs by way of certified Web API services. Some of these are well-established MLS vendors and some are created by MLSs or as a service created together by several MLSs.
MLSs no longer have to independently reach out to RESO as they had to in the past (unless they are creating their own service that they want to certify). The road to certification is simpler now and involves fewer checkpoints. You simply have to talk directly with your software provider.
Data Dictionary 2.0
An updated version of the Data Dictionary has been approved. RESO will begin testing and certifying on this new standard in 2023.
As Sam DeBord said during the conference, “On the marketing side, we call this a major improvement. On the technical side, we call this a major breaking change.”
It is not a change that RESO unilaterally decided by itself. This was voted in by you, the members, because you knew it was time for a change.
We encourage you to explore the draft version of the Data Dictionary 2.0 Wiki ahead of certification testing and to attend Data Dictionary Workgroup meetings so your voice is heard ahead of future changes.
Bidirectional Standards
The RESO Add/Edit Endorsement provides basic Create, Update and Delete (CUD) capabilities at the transport level using the RESO Web API. The Transport Workgroup and Certification Subgroup are both actively discussing this standard, and a working implementation of the standard has been verified.
Push Replication is a mechanism for data producers to “push” data change notifications to consumers as events using the EntityEvent Resource for replication purposes.
In doing so, the replication process for consumers becomes much simpler, as they will only need to “listen” for an EntityEvent being received from the producer, subsequently picking up the data corresponding to the EntityEvent from the producer’s Web API.
In general, this is preferable to having to continuously ping the data producer’s API for new records. An implementation of this standard was presented at the 2022 RESO Fall Conference and will be featured in a future blog post.
Working with Real Estate Data (WWRED)
The Business Module and accompanying RED-B designation have been wildly successful, as we have surpassed 500 students in the past two years.
The course continues to be the primer that the industry has needed for years to understand the complexities and interconnectedness of how real estate data flows through the industry.
New entrants into the real estate technology space often assume that all real estate data is available through a single data feed rather than within hundreds of systems that often do not talk to each other in logical ways, if at all, causing duplicate records and a confusing web to untangle in order to do basic business.
One of the questions we are asked the most at RESO is, “How do I get all the real estate data from the RESO Web API?” We let them down as lightly as possible. RESO does not distribute MLS property records.
Knowing is half the battle. Doing is the other half. Thus, the next wave in the WWRED series is the Technical Module and accompanying RED-T designation, which will delve into the technical side of working with real estate data. Be on the lookout for updates on this budding course in 2023.
RESO International
The RESO Data Dictionary includes French-Canadian and Spanish translations for field and lookup names, which is an important step toward expanding the dictionary’s international footprint.
RESO is constantly building relationships outside of the U.S., starting in Canada with the Canadian Real Estate Association (CREA). Canadian boards and MLSs send their data feeds to CREA, which aggregates them into the REALTOR.ca DDF® feed. CREA will be moving new connections to the DDF over to the RESO Web API standard going forward, a big achievement for CREA and the international development of standardized data distribution.
RESO has also made several forays into Europe, drawing interest particularly with its Universal Property Identifier (UPI). Recent inroads have also been made into Latin America with Mexico-based Omni MLS, which has secured partnerships with 18 countries in Central and South America.
In addition to Omni MLS, RESO will be welcoming new entrants to REACH Latin America with two free years of membership for the first cohort from the Second Century Ventures 2023 class.
Sponsorship
It is important for us to express our heartfelt gratitude to our conference sponsors at every opportunity, so here’s one more for the road into 2023 for our RESO 2022 Fall Conference sponsors.
DIAMOND SPONSORS
National Association of REALTORS®
CoreLogic
PLATINUM SPONSORS
Bright MLS
Canopy MLS
Constellation1
Homes.com | Homesnap
MLS Grid
Stellar MLS
GOLD SPONSORS
Bridge Interactive
dynaConnections
Realtor.com
Rental Beast
RentSpree
Triangle MLS
SILVER SPONSORS
CRS Data
Lone Wolf Technologies
BRONZE SPONSORS
AMP
RE/MAX
We hope to see all of you at the next conference in San Antonio this spring. Please contact Suzanne Biegenzahn at suzanne@reso.org if you would like to sponsor our next conference.
