We’re in the heart of summer, and many people are finding themselves listening to summer songs of great personal comfort this year. This week, in addition to our regular RESO coverage, we sidestep into another form of real estate data. What are we listening to now that we are spending so much time in our homes? “Summer, it turns me upside down. Summer, summer, summer. It’s like a merry-go-round.” The Cars, “Magic”
New Vice-Chair Announced
We would like to welcome Jeff Bosch as the new vice-chair of RESO’s Broker Advisory Workgroup. Jeff is the Director of MLS Services for MARIS MLS. Thank you for your service to the industry, Jeff!
All RESO workgroups now have a vice-chair to assure that meetings continue making progress each and every month and to help chairs flesh out agenda and action items. | MEET THE WORKGROUPS!
Fixing Residential Real Estate Data, Part 1
Twitter Gold!
RESO Chief Architect, Joshua Darnell (@joshuadarnell), offered up a nice little series of tweets last week, proving that the social media format can still be used for good causes. RESO goals: trending then viral! From Josh:
MLSs need to identify the RESO Standard Resources, Fields and Enumerations they support.
Each vendor contract should incorporate these items. First step is the hardest, but this allows the market to converge on a common data shape.
Vendor enters market; vendor identifies RESO standard items the MLS supports. They either find what they need or they don’t. If they do, use it. If not, ask the MLS to add the standard items they need. If no standard exists, bring it to the RESO community to create one, when applicable. Repeat.
If everyone maps the data to one format, everyone only has to map once.
Practically speaking, there will always be some locality, as real estate data can be hyperlocal. But if local items are exterior features of a listing, for instance, and they don’t exist in the standard yet, blending them into the standard format is encouraged to signal the intent.
A Different Kind of Real Estate Data
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by Greg Sax
Most of us have spent more time at home in a single year than we can ever recall as adults, and we’re only halfway through the year. Whatever metrics are used to determine the monetary worth of our homes, and whatever labels we use to define the data that makes up the way our homes are described within an MLS do not quite compare to how valuable a comfortably organized home has become during a pandemic.
How we are spending time in our homes is quite interesting. It’s no surprise that streaming service and video meeting software usage is way up. While several stocks have suffered during COVID-19, Netflix has continued to climb, while Zoom has quadrupled in value since October 2019. Meanwhile, music-listening habits have changed quite drastically.
Spotify has tracked a shift away from listening to new pop songs in favor of older songs, reflecting a desire for something familiar. Classic rock and country have benefited most from this trend.
Nielsen Music/MRC Data has also reported a decrease in pop music streaming, with music that is more than 18 months old making up as much as 63 percent of total audio streams. Part of this is due to new releases by major artists being postponed, but it’s also representative of a shift toward comfort music.
Alpha Data, an analytics company, has noted that data from streaming services show that listeners in the United States and abroad are tuning into more relaxed, mood-oriented music, as well as children’s music for the kiddos.
Spotify has noted that more acoustic, less danceable, lower energy song plays are on the rise, while Pandora is showing increases in categories like Cleaning, Family, Focus and Wind-Down.
The longer the pandemic continues, one wonders how homes themselves will change with the times. Perhaps we will begin to see more emphasis on outdoor spaces, greater use of plexiglass and areas of the home better demarcated for family gatherings vs. personal quarantine. As RESO delves more into commercial real estate, one must imagine the workplaces of tomorrow being drastically different from those of yesterday. The New Yorker discussed architecture in the time of coronavirus last month. | VIEW ARTICLE
RESO Committees and Workgroups
Note: Most links to workgroup information require member login to RESO’s online collaboration environment, Confluence.
Transport Workgroup Meeting | July 6, 2020
Meeting Summary: The workgroup further solidified the definition of the RESO Web API Server Core by approving testing recommendations made by the Certification Subgroup. The back-porting of support for Collections of Enumerations in Web API 1.0.2 Core (RCP-016) was discussed, then the group approved further work by the Certification Subgroup on naming conventions for $expand-ed resources in order to advance the proposals for the Lightweight Autofill URL and corresponding JSON response in RCP-022 and RCP-025. | CALL NOTES
Action Items
- Add deprecation notices to 2.4.10 in the Web API 1.0.2 Server specification and section 2.4.10.1 in the Web API 1.0.3 Server specification.
- Add relationship information from item (4) to the Data Dictionary spreadsheet and generate reference metadata (EDMX) with these relationships.
- Remove testing rules for items in 2.1–2.3.
- Add testing rules for ‘eq’ and ‘ne’ and enumerations to the automated testing tool for the Web API 1.0.2 Server Core tests added in (2.4).
- Ensure all items from item 2.5 and the corresponding RFC on Web API Core are resolved in the testing tool and document them appropriately.
- Move next Transport Workgroup meeting to August 10.
Board Liaison Committee Meeting | July 9, 2020
Meeting Summary: 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. Each report is provided as part of the meeting agenda and call notes. | CALL NOTES
Action Items
- Send approved Research & Development items to Rob Larson for the Data Dictionary Discussions Forum.
- Send approved Distributed Ledger item to Rob Larson for the Data Dictionary Discussions Forum.
- Schedule the Data Dictionary’s Tax Subgroup, which will be chaired by Kevin Tranby.
Certification Subgroup Meeting | July 9, 2020
Meeting Summary: A link to the Call Notes is still being put together, but in the meantime, you can see what was discussed by looking at the agenda. Most of this meeting’s efforts were spent on reviewing progress for the new Data Dictionary certification testing tool and on reference EDMX with relationships. | AGENDA
Unique Licensee Identifier (ULI) Subgroup Meeting | July 10, 2020
Meeting Summary: The group is still very much interested in working with NAR’s NRDS system as a piece of the identifier puzzle, but obtaining NRDS numbers will be a function of relationships with brokers, local/state associations and MLSs rather than NAR itself. Data flow and project ownership were major discussion topics, as was a renewed conversation about the merits of centralized vs. decentralized data. | CALL NOTES
Action Items
- Create the elevator pitch.
- Reach out to MLS software vendors and other important parties.
Workgroup Meetings This Week
- July 14: Cross-Platform Interoperability
- July 15: Internet Tracking
- July 16: Data Dictionary
