by G. Sax, Director of Growth Management, RESO
They really are happy, we swear.
Welcome to “Three Questions,” an interview series that introduces you to real estate industry professionals, their businesses and how they interact with real estate standards with a goal of humanizing the tech side of the industry, fun included.
This week, we talked with Sergio Del Rio, CIO of Templates 4 Business, Inc., which develops innovative, scalable, secure and adaptable enterprise business information systems. Sergio has worked on the MLS system for MRIS and then Bright MLS for all of the 2000s, helping the large, multistate MLS remain at the forefront of technology. On the RESO side, Sergio is the chair of our Certification Subgroup and the vice-chair of the Transport Workgroup.
Q1: The RESO Certification Subgroup is closely tied to the Transport Workgroup. Is this because it was an idea that sprouted forth from a Transport meeting or is there a reason why one should be beholden to the other?
Sergio: We thought it would be better under Transport, because eventually somebody has to approve the testing rules, approve the validation rules and make sure that we are actually testing the specification correctly. The people that make up the Transport Workgroup are qualified to create those assurances.
Q2: RESO certification was in a state of flux for a couple of years while testing rules were solidified. Why do you believe that what we’ve accomplished over the last year will pay big dividends in the future?
Sergio: The tools that we’ve built this time around truly satisfy the full extent of what we’re testing. We’re validating the metadata to assure that Data Dictionary fields and lookups come back correctly. We’re exercising the servers for different types of transactions.
Also, speed has never been a certification test, but we can now say that a provider’s speed may not be hitting the industry average. This is not meant to punish. Most MLS technology providers will believe that this is good information to know, so they can improve. If all goes well on that front, providers will post their numbers, creating a friendly competition that will drive the industry forward.
Q3: In addition to the Payloads endorsement, Add/Edit endorsement and Expand endorsement, all of which people can learn more about at RESO’s Confluence collaboration space and now on RESO’s GitHub, where do you think RESO should go next for an extension of seamless data management measures?
Sergio: We have talked about client testing. I don’t know if we can justify it based on our MLSs not having trouble with clients receiving data, but it is on our radar.
We would also like to do more with design and specification efficiency, and we will continue with other endorsements as new features come out.
