RESO Common Format Achieves New Interoperability Opportunities in Real Estate
Certification at RESO has traditionally been for MLSs and their software providers. But real estate brokerages and their technology vendors have always been an important part of the RESO ecosystem.
A newly ratified standard, RESO Common Format (RCF), gives brokers and their technology partners a better way to freely and efficiently share data between organizations. And it opens up the opportunities for more certainty in their technology planning through RESO certification.
RCF empowers a brokerage and its website vendor, CRM company, lead gen portal and back office tools to all talk to each other with data packaged in a simple, well-organized format. It keeps the broker’s data accurate and consistent across systems.
The gates have been opened for brokerages and brokerage vendors to become the first to be certified by RESO.
The trailblazing companies who piloted RCF in the marketplace illustrate the diversity of organizations within RESO’s ecosystem.
Planitar is a Canadian company that first proposed this idea at RESO. The company makes digital virtual tours and floor plans through its iGuide product, and they can now package that digital content for its customers in RCF.
Rental Beast is a company from the Boston area that uses RCF to send updates about rental listing inventory to brokers and MLSs.
MPAC is a municipal assessment organization in Ontario, Canada, that can produce its property data in this standard RESO format.
While there are some technical details, the business value is straightforward. Much like we expect our mail system to use orderly addresses: name, number, street address, city, state/province and postal code, RCF shows how to organize property data for easy readability by any technology system.
Business leaders don’t need to know the specific format, just that it’s a fairly easy lift for a technical person to work with, like a basic math course for a developer or engineer.
RCF is written in an almost universally understood format called JSON. One staff tech person from a brokerage or vendor could create a JSON file for certification in a short amount of time.
A short example of property data in the RCF standard “address shape”:
{“Country”: “US”, “StateOrProvince”: “CA”, “City”: “Los Angeles”, “PostalCode”: “90037”, “StreetName”: “S Figueroa St”, “StreetNumber”: “3911”,
“Rooms”: [{ “RoomType”: “Dining”, “RoomName”: “Breakfast”, “RoomWidth”: 4.409, “RoomLength”: 2.977, “RoomLengthWidthUnits”: “Meters” },]}
Because of RCF’s ease of creation and universal applicability, it can greatly improve the data relationships between brokers and the large data aggregators that serve everyone in the industry, from the broker’s back office to consumer-facing websites.
If your brokerage or technology vendor wants to join the leading edge of real estate tech efficiency, have your technical team explore the new RESO Common Format (RCP-025) standard.
To learn more about other RESO standards, visit the Transport Workgroup on RESO’s GitHub.
And always feel free to reach out to dev@reso.org with any questions about getting started.
