RESO Monthly – September 2021
The RESO Retreat at Kiawah Island is just around the corner. We look forward to seeing many of your faces for the first time in (checks calendar) two years! Certification deadlines for Web API and Data Dictionary are near at hand, too! Yay! Learn more in this issue of RESO Monthly.
New Members
AgentVA
AgentVA is a real estate organization based in Pleasanton, California, that is focused on simplifying your real estate business. The company is associated with Matt Dunlap, a successful marketing professional who has worked with his successful REALTOR® wife to build a strong business and team.
Biproxi
Biproxi is a digital operating system for commercial real estate that powers brokers, buyers and sellers with the tools and data they need to connect, research and transact quickly.
BrokerBay
BrokerBay is introducing an intelligent, flexible and automated board-wide ecosystem in North America that synchronizes brokerages, streamlines appointments, simplifies offer registrations, standardizes electronic lockbox access, commoditizes call centers and more.
ByOwner.com
ByOwner.com is among the oldest classified-posting websites with a focus on making home sales and rentals easy, quick and profitable.
Curbio
Curbio is a pre-sale renovation company built by construction experts and technology innovators for REALTORS® and sellers.
Evocalize
Evocalize makes sophisticated digital marketing accessible to all businesses by building technology that enables collaboration among partners.
IntelliAgent
IntelliAgent uses artificial intelligence and automation to do what contact center staff currently do, integrating with systems without custom code or IT staff involvement.
Jose Sarabia, JMS Real Estate Services, Inc.
JMS Real Estate Services, Inc., is a real estate firm based in Long Beach, California, that specializes in commercial and residential sales and has been in business since 2010 under broker Jose Sarabia.
Land Intelligence
Land Intelligence leverages big data ingestion, on-the-ground relationships and a patented software algorithm to provide a solution for land acquisition and due diligence.
MILLIE
MILLIE provides services and opportunities for military people to help each other eradicate stress from the military move.
Occupi
Occupi is a direct property manager-to-tenant self-showing company based in New York City.
We’re glad to have all these organizations as RESO members!
Certification Update
The clock is ticking, and every REALTOR®-owned MLS needs to be in compliance with Data Dictionary 1.7 and Web API Core 1.0.2 by November 10, 2021. | LEARN MORE
Several MLS vendors are in the process of being certified. Once that is complete, MLSs can expect to hear directly from their vendor about how to apply for and receive near-immediate certification.
Some vendors are already certified and have reached out to MLSs to have them go through the final steps necessary to be listed on RESO’s website and certification map as being up to date on certification.
Policy Requirements for REALTOR® MLSs
National Association of REALTORS® (NAR) policy dictates that MLSs owned and operated by REALTOR® organizations must be in compliance with RESO’s most recently ratified standards within 12 months of RESO ratification.
A recent NAR policy update also requires REALTOR® MLSs’ Web API services to include all fields available in their RETS, FTP or other data access services. These fields must be delivered in conformance with RESO Data Dictionary standards.
RESO Hits the Road with Refreshed Industry Message: RETS Will End
RESO participated in the National Association of REALTORS® Innovation, Opportunity & Investment (iOi) Summit in August, will be participating in the Council of Multiple Listing Services (CMLS) conference in September and will be hosting its own conference in October.
At iOi, RESO CEO Sam DeBord was given an opportunity to talk about the importance of third-party verification for the adherence to data standards and how important that is to new technology development. It’s difficult to build modern tech on broken or outdated systems.
To that end, while on stage, Sam dropped the hammer on the impending switch from RETS to Web API for data transfer, but it won’t be heavy handed. In the coming months, RESO will introduce a T-RETS countdown to the extinction of an industry dinosaur. We will highlight the organizations that have already embraced the Web API comet and those that are well ahead of the pack.
The RESO Web API’s time has arrived, and the next era of real estate data transfer will be a Paradise Age, not an Ice Age.
RESO’s upcoming certification reports were also teased at iOi. You can see some initial screenshots of these reports on the Certification section of RESO’s website (subject to change).
Keep your eyes open to more news from RESO at other conferences or consider inviting us to your conference. Where there is real estate, there is RESO.
RESO Staff News
Your favorite standards organization has been growing to accommodate the growing needs of the industry. You can always find our faces over at About RESO, but we’d like to tell you about three of our latest hires.
Pictured left to right: Randi Clodfelter, Jason Darrough, Val Taylor
Randi Clodfelter is RESO’s new Membership Manager, coming to us directly from Triangle MLS. She’ll be keeping our membership tidy and growing while also keeping attendance active for new classes like our Working With Real Estate Data designation course. You may also see her at CMLS this fall, so say hello!
Jason Darrough is RESO’s new Technical Product Manager, coming to us directly from MARIS. He’ll be working to keep our technical products documented properly and moving forward while also taking over many of the note-taking duties of workgroups. You may also hear him read RESO’s Antitrust Policy at a future meeting.
Joshua Darnell
Val Taylor is RESO’s new Membership Associate, coming to us with 12 years of membership and communications experience at Seattle King County REALTORS®. Val will be fine-tuning our membership across multiple platforms, filling in gaps of interoperability (one of our favorite words at RESO) and making sure all joints are oiled.
We’re thrilled to be moving in a positive direction at RESO, and these three experienced real estate professionals have everything to do with our optimistic outlook.
In addition, we would like to announce that Josh Darnell has been named RESO Chief Technology Officer. Josh will continue to create streamlined pathways to certification and bring the technical products to light that RESO members have asked for.
RESO Retreat
Please join us October 18–21, 2021, for the RESO Retreat at Kiawah Island Golf Resort in South Carolina, which will be an onsite and livestream event. Simply choose which option works best for you.
Registration at regular prices closed September 3, 2021, but late registration is still open.
Still not convinced? Shame! Check out our “12 Reasons to Attend the RESO Retreat” and be appropriately wowed. It’s a RESO conference, so you know there will be extra surprises.
Interested in becoming a conference sponsor? Contact suzanne@reso.org for more info.
Many thanks to our current sponsors who make this event possible!
RESO Board of Directors Election
It’s somewhat early to be talking about end-of-year elections, but we want to assure that candidates have plenty of time to design their yard signs.
Seats will be open for election in Class B and Class C in November. You can read more about membership classes on our website. | MEMBERSHIP CLASSES
More details will be coming later this month.
Workgroup Spotlight – Showing Subgroup
The showing space has seen plenty of new and evolving players this year. In light of the additional companies offering showing services, there is a need for the Data Dictionary to account for different systems being able to talk data at each other in a seamless way to accommodate customer needs. Enter a new Data Dictionary Workgroup spinoff called the Showing Subgroup.
The temporary group has been tasked to create a common terminology to be added to the Data Dictionary that can be used between systems.
This is not about implementations or the data language used between an MLS and a showing provider. This is about unique showing ecosystems talking to each other.
There have been three meetings so far, and the meetings are drawing quite a crowd. More than 60 people have participated in at least one meeting. Attendance is great, metadata is better, dictionary definitions are best!
Go to RESO’s Confluence membership space and navigate to the Data Dictionary Workgroup to learn more.
RESO Workgroup Meetings
Data Consumers Subgroup | July 19, 2021
In the first Data Consumers Subgroup meeting, technology vendors, MLS vendors, MLS representatives and other real estate industry professionals gathered to go over “pain points” of working with real estate data in this data transport-related offshoot of RESO’s popular biannual conference Pain Points session. The goal is to create more frequent touch points and more meaningful action plans to erase pain in an orderly and measurable fashion. | VIEW CALL NOTES
Days on Market Business Descriptions Subgroup | August 2, 2021
The group reviewed the Days on Market (DOM) formula that has been shared in the StandardDOM – Business Descriptions Discussion Forum and went over listing status progression scenarios to determine proper interpretations of DOM. Consensus treatment of DOM was found for two common scenarios – Purchase Contract failed to close and Purchase Contract closed escrow – and then the group agreed that any status being On Market or Off Market would be defined by the Data Dictionary definitions of the statuses. | VIEW CALL NOTES
Showing Subgroup | August 4, 2021
In the inaugural Showing Subgroup meeting, the group discussed industry goals for revisiting showings in the Data Dictionary, critical components of scheduling showings, what’s missing from the Showing resource and a roadmap for achieving goals. | VIEW CALL NOTES
Research & Development Workgroup | August 5, 2021
The group discussed rules around the display of licensee contact information, the ongoing collapsing of organizations down from two IDs to one ID in the transition from the sunsetting OUID to Unique Organization Identifier (UOI), the ongoing advancement of the Unique Licensee Identifier (ULI), and a keep-alive mechanism for a session and finding a standard to service providers to extend sessions. | VIEW CALL NOTES
Unique Licensee Identifier (ULI) Subgroup | August 6, 2021
There was a review of user stories, followed by a presentation of some initial UI designs. The group reviewed current project goals, which are to develop a UI for the prototype and deploy it so ULI Pilot participants can test with real data and help refine the search methodology; these results will ultimately become part of a case study and white paper on how to search and deduplicate licensee information. | VIEW CALL NOTES
Board Liaison Committee | August 6, 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 | August 9, 2021
The workgroup continued discussion of the Field resource, and then talked about whether to tackle the Add/Edit or Expand endorsement next, with the group preferring the former at this point. Data Dictionary JSON Payloads from any API were revisited, a topic which the Transport group had previously approved proposals for, which now have two implementations with providers seeking certification. | VIEW CALL NOTES
Interoperability Workgroup | August 10, 2021
The workgroup discussed the addition of a Transaction Management Contacts resource to the Data Dictionary. Terms and data shape are still being discussed, but the group is working toward a final vote next month to present to the Data Dictionary Workgroup. Once the group moves Transaction Management forward, it may be looking more closely at documents, particularly signatures. Subject matter experts are actively being engaged not only for this topic but for other possible pain points of cross-platform interoperability. | VIEW CALL NOTES
Showing Subgroup | August 11, 2021
This second meeting of the Showing Subgroup continued to define the scope of these meetings, which is not implementation strategies but determination of a common terminology for inclusion in the Data Dictionary that is based on existing metadata of organizations that are currently active in the showing space. Between this meeting and the next subgroup meeting on September 1, the group is collecting metadata for further discussion and comparison. | VIEW CALL NOTES
UPI Registry Subgroup | August 11, 2021
The group continues to work on how to market the UPI and how to build a UPI Registry. Work will be done to shine a more focused light on what the UPI is, how to use it and why it is a great tool. Meanwhile, a new UPI Service Container has been built that is actively in search of testing, usage and feedback. | VIEW CALL NOTES
Internet Tracking Workgroup | August 18, 2021
The workgroup talked about how Redfin and other sites implement tracking, using artificial intelligence (AI) or otherwise. This was followed up by a discussion about how single sign-on (SSO) products provide tracking information and possible ways it could be approved upon for the benefit of stakeholders. Lastly, current events about privacy were discussed. | VIEW CALL NOTES
Certification Subgroup | August 19, 2021
The workgroup discussed the specification and testing rules for the Expand endorsement as well as the migration of Transport and Certification specifications to GitHub. | VIEW CALL NOTES
Distributed Ledger Workgroup | August 24, 2021
The workgroup discussed the concept of containers to validate Universal Property Identifiers (UPIs), its features, how to increase their adoption and the best approach to document the standard. | VIEW CALL NOTES
Universal Property Identifier (UPI) | August 25, 2021
The group decided to sunset the separate UPI Registry Subgroup meeting, and then discussed UPI field population, a Data Dictionary change from PUID to UPI and what the immediate focus should be to promote UPI adoption. | VIEW CALL NOTES
Showing Subgroup | September 1, 2021
The group continued to define the goal of creating a common terminology for showing service to showing service interoperability to be included in the Data Dictionary. Submitted metadata was discussed and compared for commonality but more showing service metadata would help develop what is beginning to look like a unique Data Dictionary resource. | VIEW CALL NOTES
Research & Development Workgroup | September 2, 2021
The group discussed the priority and future of the IdP Keep-Alive Interaction along with pivoting the Licensee Display Rules to include social media links. There was also a status update on the Unique Organization Identifier (UOI) merging project and a discussion about which topics would be discussed during the RESO Retreat fall conference. | VIEW CALL NOTES
Upcoming September 2021 RESO Workgroup Meetings
- Friday, September 10: Unique Licensee Identifier (ULI) (Subgroup of Research and Development)
- Monday, September 13: Transport
- Tuesday, September 14: Cross-Platform Interoperability
- Wednesday, September 15: Showing (Subgroup of Data Dictionary)
- Wednesday, September 15: Internet Tracking
- Thursday, September 16: Data Dictionary
- Thursday, September 16: Certification (Subgroup of Transport)
- Friday, September 17: Commercial Real Estate (CRE) (Subgroup of Data Dictionary)
- Wednesday, September 22: Universal Property Identifier (UPI)
- Thursday, September 23: Payloads
- Tuesday, September 28: Distributed Ledger
