Welcome to RESO Monthly!
This is the first issue of RESO Monthly, our newsletter that replaces our Confluence-based “Weekly Activity” posts. This more complete package will draw your attention to the top causes that RESO champions. Workgroup links will continue to lead back to member-only discussions, but the summaries alone should keep casual observers informed. However you choose to participate in RESO, thank you for being here. Your membership is important to organized real estate.
Message From RESO Chair, Rebecca Jensen
Hello and happy summer, RESO members! Real estate activity is heating up right along with the temperature, and real estate professionals are enjoying a return to serving our markets with a new focus on technology and efficiency for our customers.
Industry events are also hot again as we open back up for in-person business. RESO Retreat in October at the Kiawah Island Golf Resort in South Carolina will be a reunion you won’t forget! Registration details are included in this newsletter.
RESO certification continues to accelerate in 2021 with more than 150 organizations already passing certification testing this year. If your organization isn’t in the queue yet for our latest standards certifications (Data Dictionary 1.7 and Web API Core 1.0.2), your software vendor can contact certification@reso.org for more information.
RESO’s workgroups continue to do amazing work each month:
The Data Dictionary Workgroup will be publishing version 1.8 this year, while subgroups have also been formed to cover new standards for caravans, commercial real estate, residential rentals, days on market, French-Canadian translations and more. To join the Data Dictionary Workgroup or any of its subgroups, reach out to gsax@reso.org.
In other workgroups, Broker Advisory is providing feedback on the Listing Exchange and Access Policy (LEAP); Interoperability continues to dig deeper on transaction management; Distributed Ledger is working with the Universal Property Identifier Workgroup on a registry concept; Internet Tracking is building an implementation toolkit; Payloads is working on an appraisal payload; and Research & Development continues to develop the Unique Licensee Identifier.
The Transport Workgroup is building out enhancements to our standards like the Add/Edit (Web API Update) standard, a new field metadata resource, certification analytics and performance reporting that take our standards to a new level of transparency that will drive adoption of the RESO Web API.
RESO is busy and we know you are, too! I hope that you find the work we do together at RESO as fulfilling as I do, and that you take the time to enjoy this summer. We’re looking forward to seeing you this fall.
Rebecca Jensen
New Members
RESO welcomes new members, Better Real Estate, Instashowing, Real Estate Board of New York (REBNY) and Broker Affiliate: LancLiving Realty.
Better Real Estate believes that homeownership should be fast, transparent and low-cost for everyone. They are using technology for efficiency and humans for the friendly.
Instashowing, based in Bend, Oregon, is on a mission to simplify showing management by helping agents and consumers get to closing faster.
The Real Estate Board of New York (REBNY) is a New York real estate trade association founded in 1869 that works on behalf of mutual interests of its members by promoting public and industry policies.
LancLiving Realty is a brokerage in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, that provides real estate services via agents that value integrity, inclusivity and community involvement. They aim to educate and serve their clients with skill and care while advocating for ethical practices in real estate.
We’re glad to have each of them as RESO members!
New Certifications
During June 2021, certification for Data Dictionary 1.7 and Web API Core 1.0.2 were issued to the following organizations:
- Bay East Association of REALTORS®
- bridgeMLS
- Capital Area Technology & REALTOR® Services (Tallahassee Board of REALTORS®)
- Contra Costa Association of REALTORS®
- Georgia MLS
- Martin County REALTORS® of the Treasure Coast
- New Mexico MLS
- Northern Great Lakes REALTORS® MLS
- Out East
- StreetEasy
- Zillow
Certification is fully open! We’re ready and waiting for more applications to come our way. MLSs should contact their MLS vendors. MLS vendors and other technology companies should contact dev@reso.org or certification@reso.org for more information or visit RESO’s Certification page, especially the portion about the simplified certification process.
RESO Retreat
This fall, RESO is going on an island getaway.
Please join us October 18–21, 2021, for the RESO Retreat at Kiawah Island Golf Resort in South Carolina. This event will be offering both livestream and onsite programming. Simply choose which option works best for you.
Registration is open now through September 10, 2021, at $450 for members and $550 for non-members.
The call for RESO REtreat speakers is now open. | COMPLETE THE PRESENTATION REQUEST
Interested in becoming a conference sponsor? Contact suzanne@reso.org for more info.
Thanks to Our Current RESO Retreat Sponsors!
Diamond, Platinum, Gold, Silver and Bronze Levels
RESO at Inman Connect
During June 15–17, 2021, Inman held what should be their final forced online-only event. The long-time trade publication and event staple did a fine job of engaging attendees during the Zoom-focused gathering. The interviews and content were relevant to today’s real estate topics of conversation, and RESO is proud to say that CEO Sam DeBord and board chair Rebecca Jensen represented our organization well in four different talkers.
Sam joined Elise Fay (eXp Realty), Joe Rand (Broker Public Portal) and Jeffrey Sibbach (eXp Realty) to discuss “The End of the Two-Sided Deal.” The group discussed pocket listings, clear cooperation and how the MLS system of cooperating brokers sharing commission is under attack by lawsuits and competing business models. | VIEW SESSION (may require subscription)
With consolidation happening across multiple platforms, “Who Owns Your Tech and Data?” and how does it help you make decisions? What happens if a vendor becomes a competitor? Sam and Denee Evans, CEO of Council of Multiple Listing Services (CMLS), moderated for speakers, Alissa Harper (Inside Real Estate) and Brad Bjelke (UtahRealEstate.com). | VIEW SESSION (may require subscription)
“RESO brings technology to our industry easier with efficiencies.” So said Rebecca Jensen during “The Role of the MLS in Our New Normal,” a discussion shared with Matt Consalvo (ARMLS) and Denee Evans (CMLS). Zillow, CoStar and showing services were all discussed as part of the changing role of the MLS. Rebecca splashed RESO-positive zingers throughout the session, including, “We look to RESO to say, hey, can we not have things scattered across the industry and having their individual way of doing things. We can take change in. We’re making a standard for the Unique Property Identifier. The ramifications of every MLS adopting that from a broker or agent standpoint…all of that will help us bring in multiple areas.” Preach! | VIEW SESSION (may require subscription)
In “Interoperability: Where We Need To Go,” Sam spoke with Michael Lane (ShowingTime) and Guy Wolcott (Homesnap) about how the showing space has gotten crowded as a result of ShowingTime selling to Zillow, a technology company that has also declared itself to be a broker. After the sale, showing services have sprouted to offer an alternative. As more companies enter the showings space, Guy Wolcott said he doesn’t want walled gardens to start popping up all over the country. He would prefer interoperability based on lightweight standards. Mike Lane said that he’s aligned with MLSs that want to offer choice. ShowingTime has done integrations before and will do them again. | VIEW SESSION (may require subscription)
RESO Members Bright MLS, CRMLS, and MRED Collaborate on Offering Choice in Showing Management
Three of the nation’s leading MLSs announced that they are strategizing to create standards to support choice in showings for the MLS industry.
Leaders from Bright MLS, California Regional Multiple Listing Service (CRMLS) and Midwest Real Estate Data (MRED) have recognized that growth in the showing service space has indicated that an underlying API for service providers would create the best experience for real estate professionals, MLSs and showing services alike.
The goal of the initiative is to create standards for how to structure information and how providers and consumers will send and receive information.
All three organizations are heavily involved with RESO and supportive of data standardization across the industry via the RESO Data Dictionary. A RESO subgroup will be forming to address the changing showings landscape this summer.
After gathering feedback from the broader real estate community, the three MLSs plan to unveil the API in Q3 2021. | READ MORE
RESO Workgroup Meetings
Research & Development Workgroup | June 3, 2021
The group primarily discussed the Licensee Display Rules business case and the OUID to UOI project. The business case will receive a Discussion Forum topic to encourage further dialogue, and the UOI proof of concept that was presented received positive feedback and will continue to be built out. | VIEW CALL NOTES
Board Liaison Committee | June 4, 2021
This meeting is held once per month in order to give workgroup chairs an opportunity to converse about their top agenda items, request help from each other and provide summary reports to the RESO Board of Directors. The reports are collected and shared as part of the meeting’s official call notes. | VIEW CALL NOTES
Transport Workgroup | June 7, 2021
The workgroup created the Data Consumers Subgroup, led by Rick Herrera, to discuss and help address Web API and Data Dictionary issues seen in production, as well as other pain points. The remainder of the discussion focused on the Field resource for conveying metadata about fields, a review of versioning and the rewrite of the Web API 2.0.0 specification as well as RCP-034, which allows data providers to reject requests with missing User-Agent headers. Updates were given regarding Payloads testing, the Web API Add/Edit specification and testing spec, and the Web API Reference Server. | VIEW CALL NOTES
Interoperability Workgroup | June 8, 2021
The group turned its collective eyes toward the Data Dictionary’s Contacts resource and ContactType lookups in order to move forward with its Transaction Management (TM) and eventual Customer Relationship Management (CRM) ideas around MemberTypes and interoperability between systems. CRM vendors will be contacted in an attempt to keep terminology consistent between TM and CRM, also with an eye toward showings. | VIEW CALL NOTES
UPI Registry Subgroup | June 9, 2021
This meeting was entirely dedicated to a UPI Registry API review, touching upon date qualifiers (and date terms) for facts, scoring determinants and marketing the UPI with good visual components, like having the ability to simply type an address to get a UPI. | VIEW CALL NOTES
Unique Licensee Identifier (ULI) Subgroup | June 11, 2021
A demo of a weighted, probabilistic scoring algorithm was shown on ULI pilot data, with normalized confidence scores depending on the ULI fields that matched and allowing for fuzziness and transposition. A server will be set up in the cloud and populated with the ULI pilot data. It will be available to participants who have signed the pilot agreement prior to next month’s meeting, as will workflow and user interface (UI) diagrams. Time permitting, a UI might be created so pilot participants can start testing the matching behavior against their data sets. Volunteers are welcome and needed. | VIEW CALL NOTES
Internet Tracking Workgroup | June 16, 2021
The group discussed the concept of scroll event metrics and whether or not they should be added to the Internet Tracking standard. The conversation about building an Internet Tracking implementation toolkit continued. The group is generally amenable to the idea of creating a means to draw attention to the Internet Tracking standard by sharing instructions, best practices and success stories for using the Internet Tracking resource. | VIEW CALL NOTES
Data Dictionary Workgroup | June 17, 2021
The group voted to add French-Canadian translations to Data Dictionary 1.8 and to add two new Property Subtypes for Co-Ownership and Tenancy in Common to Data Dictionary 1.9. Business descriptions for standard days on market, tax assessment frequency other than annual and expanding the scope of the Authorization Information for Data Consumers Subgroup were also topics of discussion. | VIEW CALL NOTES
Certification Subgroup | June 17, 2021
The group reviewed Add/Edit testing rules for Create, Update and Delete, including success and failure cases, as well as the new Web API 2.0.0 Endorsement section containing the revised Web API Core specification, which is now in line with the testing rules and incorporates several RCPs submitted by workgroup members over the last several years. The Field resource structure and fields were discussed further, a RESO development update was given, showing progress with automated database generation, and the group talked about the need for the Expand Endorsement. | VIEW CALL NOTES
Broker Advisory Workgroup | June 18, 2021
After a brief update on a set of three small-group meetings focused on the Listing Exchange and Access Policy (LEAP), the workgroup spent the bulk of the meeting discussing the importance of an interoperable and trackable tech stack within the brokerage community. Pain points in technology can be greatly reduced with more communication, education and usage reporting from the vendor community. RESO’s Internet Tracking Workgroup has been working on standards for tracking, and the Cross-Platform Interoperability Workgroup has been tackling topics related to systems that could benefit from more interoperability, namely transaction management, showing solutions and customer relationship management (CRM). Working with other workgroups and staying vocal about broker needs will continue to drive the conversation and actionable outcomes forward. | VIEW CALL NOTES
Distributed Ledger Workgroup | June 22, 2021
The workgroup delved into best practices around publishing and packaging the group’s work in GitHub, then they discussed the resolver proof of concept related to certifying data providers before they can write to the Universal Property Identifier (UPI) registry, which would be a new kind of certification. | VIEW CALL NOTES
Universal Property Identifier (UPI) Workgroup | June 23, 2021
The group discussed the current state of UPI usage in the industry, which barely registers, and why adoption has been so low. Strategies for increasing adoption were part of the discussion, including bulking up a certification requirement around the UPI and tracking UPI usage as part of a greater RESO strategy to provide more data analytics. | VIEW CALL NOTES
Payloads Workgroup | June 24, 2021
The group continued its work on defining an Appraisal Payload by reviewing and commenting upon fields in the Property resource. So far, 212 fields have been accepted for inclusion, but there are several more that will be reviewed during the next meeting, and it would appear that more fields will be added. In addition, there were some new field suggestions that will be forwarded to the Data Dictionary Workgroup for further discussion. | VIEW CALL NOTES
July 2021 RESO Workgroup Meetings
Week 1
Thursday, July 1: Research & Development(Canceled)
Week 2
- Friday, July 9: Unique Licensee Identifier (ULI) (Subgroup of Research and Development)
- Friday, July 9: Board Liaison Committee
Week 3
- Monday, July 12: Transport
- Tuesday, July 13: Cross-Platform Interoperability
- Wednesday, July 14: UPI Registry (Subgroup of Universal Property Identifier (UPI))
- Thursday, July 15: Data Dictionary
- Thursday, July 15: Certification (Subgroup of Transport)
Week 4
- Wednesday, July 21: Internet Tracking
- Thursday, July 22: Payloads
- Friday, July 23: Unique Licensee Identifier (ULI) (Subgroup of Research and Development)
Week 5
- Tuesday, July 27: Distributed Ledger
- Wednesday, July 28: Universal Property Identifier (UPI)
