Homes.com put RESO standards to the test by asking: What is the real business value of RESO Data Standards? Their findings have been published as a white paper. | VIEW WHITE PAPER
If you have doubted the economic value of RESO data standards, and haven’t adopted them based on that doubt, that’s akin to reading by candlelight. You can do it, but you’re only getting about 12.57 lumens. And long term, it’s killing your eyes.
If you have adopted RESO data standards, but haven’t implemented them, that’s a big leap forward from reading by candlelight. You’re using a standard 60-watt bulb that is producing about 800 lumens. Long-term, it is killing your pocketbook.
But if you have implemented RESO data standards, like Homes.com has, you’ve replaced all your standard bulbs with LEDs. That means an 8–12 watt LED bulb is giving you that same 800 lumens, and that means your annual savings are adding up fast.
What Homes.com Did
Homes.com is a charter member of RESO and has been active in volunteering and contributor to workgroups and board seats. In the real estate industry, Homes.com is known for its endurance and innovation.
Homes.com implemented both the RESO Data Dictionary and the RESO Web API internally within their infrastructure and externally for receiving real estate data from MLSs, brokerages and technology firms. For the white paper, they looked at:
- Time to integrate new MLS feeds in existing products and services
- Time to convert existing MLS feeds from nonstandard to RESO standards
- Time to update established MLS feeds to RESO standards
- Time to troubleshoot listing issues
Homes.com worked with six MLS partners and three different MLS systems to test their new approach throughout several different environments.
They used both Data Dictionary 1.5 and 1.6 Platinum certified RESO installations and tested RESO Web API 1.0.2 Gold, Bronze and Core certified MLSs to understand better how to deploy RESO standards in a variety of levels of RESO certifications.
They compared the development time required to deploy a new feed using the legacy RETS approach versus the new RESO Web API approach. They wanted to see if moving from the standard light bulb to the LED light bulb would be worth the effort.
What Homes.com did for the entire real estate industry was replicate the variables that exist in the “real world” when anyone is ingesting and deploying data from several MLS markets.
Homes.com Sought Collaboration
Sharing ideas about how to create a more efficient real estate marketplace is key to what standards are all about, and Homes.com gets this.
Homes.com drew on the expertise of the best practices of their data partners for deploying standardized information. They also realized that documentation is key to success when migrating from one data process to another. Documentation became a core element of the Homes.com approach.
That’s a critical reason that RESO has developed several documents and technical resources that we make available free to the developers, brokers, technology companies and MLS organizations to assist with data standards adoption and implementation.
What Homes.com Discovered
Homes.com was able to reduce the time of launching a RETS market from 25 to 16 hours by using the new Data Dictionary offering. That’s a reduction of 35% in developer’s time and costs!
Putting that into numbers your CFO can understand, if Homes.com ends up doing this for a couple of hundred customers, it would change a regular data mapping installation from 45,000 hours and nearly $7 million for 700 MLS installations to 38,000 hours and less than $6 million.
Share those numbers with your CFO when you talk about renewing your RESO membership or attending our next conference.
More Savings with the RESO Web API
As enormous the cost savings were with RESO Data Dictionary standardization for Homes.com, the RESO Web API implementation numbers are even more stunning.
The ease of using the RESO Web API helped Homes.com simplify the data ingestion and distribution process even further. The Homes.com development team used to have an implementation time of 24 hours on RETS, but it only took 2 hours with the RESO Web API for the first listing source. The second listing source took just two hours and only $300.
Again, using the equation we used to measure deploying feeds across 700 markets, the cost for the RESO Web API reduced the cost by more than 90% to map the entire country.
The Big Takeaway
The Homes.com findings, combined with the experience of many more forward-thinking innovators, provides more proof that RESO standards are working, not just for technological currency but also hard dollar savings and time savings that have now been documented.
