With Michael Wurzer
Michael Wurzer is a perennial champion for the adoption of data standards in the real estate industry. He is the President and CEO of FBS, the creator of Flexmls and the Spark API Platform, and serves as the Vice Chair of the Real Estate Standards Organization (RESO).
In this video interview, Wurzer explains the role that RESO plays in the real estate industry today and how RESO will impact real estate’s future.
“The goal for RESO is to help create a more efficient marketplace for real estate,” says Wurzer. “That includes for brokers and includes technology, but overall is focused on making sure that the market is as efficient as it can possibly be.”
Wurzer explains that RESO assists in creating a “more efficient marketplace” by implementing standards focused on modern technology and sharing data. That translates into “lower costs and faster time to market,” according to Wurzer. “Ultimately, it’s about the business side for brokers and agents to make sure that they’re able to serve the consumer in the best way possible.”
Wurzer notes that his firm’s Spark API and other APIs based on the RESO Web API standard are being utilized for more efficient and modern data sharing. Since RESTful APIs like the RESO Web API are common throughout the technology industry, they bring more innovation to the real estate industry at a faster pace.
Wurzer explains, “Having an API that’s easy to use [and] that’s easy to support is really beneficial to us and our customers.” Because the APIs are tied to the RESO Data Dictionary, Wurzer says that customers can “see these fields in the same way across all the different MLSs that we serve.”
RESO standards enable innovation through improved efficiency and more technology options. Wurzer says that RESO collaboration is the key to having MLS organizations, brokers and their vendor partners bring maximum value to their customers. Wurzer states that with real estate being a collaborative industry, it is necessary for competitors to cooperate and create a more efficient marketplace.
Says Wurzer, “It essentially allows us to do our job and focus on innovation as opposed to custom fitting all these things together.”
In Wurzer’s view, the next five years will see RESO standards continuing to become more widespread and a baseline expectation for new technology products.
“All of that investment that has been made, and is being made at an accelerated rate, is going to bring more and more innovation, and I think it will be clear that it was the standards that really spurred that along,” says Wurzer.
One current example of how standards are having an impact on the industry is with the recent proliferation of MLS consolidations.
“Consolidation is a huge issue for MLS organizations today, and standards is kind of a really important method of enabling consolidation and making it go faster and easier,” says Wurzer.
He goes on to state that standards enable data sharing in a way that’s never been contemplated before and that new and clever solutions based on data standards are likely to make life a lot easier for everyone that works with real estate data.
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