Clear Cooperation Rule and MLS Standards For Brokerages With RESO

Brokerage Insider

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The standards for how real estate data is transferred from MLSs to data vendors has been updated. Has your real estate brokerage platform vendor updated their platform to use the data dictionary and the RESO WebAPI? Sam DeBord, the CEO of RESO, joins Eric Stegemann to discuss how RESO helps brokers and why they should pay attention to these standards.

We cover

• What is RESO and why brokers should join
• MLS Clear Cooperation (Rule 8)
• myDX (brokers getting their own data)

TRANSCRIPTION

Eric Stegemann (00:01):

Hi, everybody. Welcome to Brokerage Insider the podcast where we interview some of the leaders in tech for real estate today, I am very lucky to be joined by Sam DeBord. He's the CEO of the Real Estate Standards Organization. Thanks for joining me, Sam.

Sam DeBord

Thanks for having me on Eric. It's nice to see you at least virtually whenever I can.

Eric Stegemann

Yeah, I know. Right before the show we started recording and, and Sam was mentioning how we would normally see each other maybe eight times a year, at least. And you know, it's very different year this year, and we're not able to do that, but resell put on a great virtual conference. If you need a, a primer for how to put on a great virtual conference where people actually felt connected ring up Sam and his team, they put on a fabulous one a couple of months back, and it was a lot of fun to be there during the day, get great information, but also they kept people connected even at night. Like a lot of these events you do when you're in person where you have a beverage with somebody after hours Sam's team actually made that happen in a virtual environment, which I hadn't seen up until that point. So cheers to do to you and your team doing a great job there. And hopefully we can be in person again here soon.

Sam DeBord

Yeah, thanks for that, Eric. We actually did have a lot of fun with that. Nothing like changing a full in-person conference to a virtual one in a month, but our, our team did an awesome job getting that event together and we really did have a lot of fun and resell conferences are all always supposed to be a good time. So we'll do virtual receptions however we can and make the best of it. And we're trying to have the usual sort of a hotel bar room and lobby con conversations that we don't get to have in in this current situation here. So we'll keep trying to make these events fun.

Eric Stegemann (01:49):

Yup. You're doing great. Keep it going. So for those that aren't knowledgeable on what RESO is, and it's unfortunate that I'm going to say the next sentence, which is, I think most brokerages, brokerage staff, people do not know what the Real Estate Standards Organization is. Can you give us a little background on it and what the mission of the organization is?

Sam DeBord

Sure. And I think you're right in assessing the situation. And, and it's okay that a lot of brokers don't know I was a broker for 20 years. I didn't really know what resell was for quite a few years at the beginning of that time, because most of us aren't that deeply involved into the guts of your technology. You're looking for products and services that work together. So that's what RESO is.

RESO creates open standards that allow for efficiency in your technology. It allows your tools to talk to each other. So, RESO was started about 20 years ago with a small group of very smart techie people looking to build a standard so we can transfer data between different systems to fuel your apps, your programs, your reports, et cetera. And it's over the last 20 years to be a very influential organization. It, we have hundreds and hundreds of member organizations that represent technology companies like the biggest portals in the world you'd expect the biggest brokerages. The biggest MLS is, and lots of small independent organizations as well to where our membership now covers 35,000 brokerage offices, 1.5 million licensees or salespeople. So it's really a very broad effect and continues to bring more and more efficiency. So if you want to think about it on a very simple level when you talk about technology standards, what does that mean?

Sam DeBord (03:40):

I, it's basically just a common universal language, so the tools can talk to each other. So you have an iPhone, you've got Gmail on the iPhone. You can pull up a Chrome browser and look at your Gmail, go to Amazon, go to the Microsoft store. These are all companies that want to put each other out of business. They all want to eat each other's lunch, but these tools work together because all those technology companies have said, let's agree to an open standard, let's agree to a standard that will allow us to share data in the same language. And then we'll compete on top of that. And that's really what Risa was founded on was to be able to help people's technology tools, talk to each other. And as a brokerage advocate, Eric, you know this very well, this is a difficult thing to do in the brokerage stack to get your front end agent tools, to work with your back office tools, your financial tools, CRMs, MLS tools. And so that's really what RESO exists for is to continue making those connections and helping people make their systems speak that same language. So we can basically help professionals do a better job with consumers and be more informative that way.

Eric Stegemann (04:47):

I oftentimes call the reef, the standards that RESO has created and, and all of this inner workings that most brokers and most agents will never see. I call it the plumbing of real estate. And I, I think it's, it's, you know, obviously a house it's so vital to have good plumbing, good, you know, electric lines and you don't always see how it all works, but gosh, darn it. You need it to work. Right. And I think that's part of the mission of RESO is to keep that plumbing of the real estate tech world, particularly, I think it's part of their mission to, to keep it working efficiently, not only to keep it working, but also to keep it up to date and running as efficient as possible. And Sam has done just a phenomenal job since taking over as the CEO not terribly long ago, he's done a phenomenal job at impacting the industry with this.

Sam DeBord (05:42):

Well, thanks, I think as good, a good extension to your analogy. And that's to keep that plumbing modern and anyone who's remodeled old house, you know, those old corroded pipes that fill up the water may be flowing, but it gets smaller and smaller and less and less throughput in your systems. And at a certain point, we need to continue to upgrade the infrastructure and put in new plumbing systems and allow people to use all of the new things they want to be able to do, and not simply have a one bed, one bath sort of home. So there's, there's always work to be done in improving standards and moving people's technology forward.

Eric Stegemann (06:19):

Yup. So let's talk about standards for, for here for a little bit. So, you know, the big standard that was around for, you know, 20 years now that RESO pushed out there and has helped create. And one of the ways that technology is as good as it is today in the real estate industry is because of Rex. Tell us a little bit about the history of rats, how it came to be, and then where, where it's going and being sun setted here.

Sam DeBord (06:47):

Sure. So it'll Rex was, was really important. It was an agreement by players across the industry. That again, let's have a single language for getting data back and forth. Let's have the same way that we all know. We can go pick up data from one location and put it into another system. And the industry decided we were going to do a proprietary language. We were going to create this ourselves. And so we sort of did I wouldn't say out of thin air, but you had a lot of really, really smart people come together and say, let's build this language specifically for real estate. So it served the industry really well. It, it allowed people to understand how to transfer data in a more modern way than what we did before, which what we did before was just go out and pick up massive buckets of data and bring them in and try to find how to organize those.

And it would be different with every single technology company that you worked with. But it was also something that was a first stage. It was something to start to modernize. And, you know, maybe take us from a steam engine to a, a, a model T car. You know, we're looking at just sort of stages of advancement in technology. So more recently we've looked at modern API APIs. And I know if everybody's not a techie person on the call, you might your API APIs and think, Oh boy, they're going to go down a rabbit hole here. But really all it is is again, a way for systems to talk to each other and technology companies all around the world today, use API as an easy way to integrate. You can think about it as a, a, the back of your smart TV.

Sam DeBord (08:20):

And it's got all these plugs and jacks and everything on it. It's like an API. This is how you get information in and out in a modern way. And while Rhett's was an API, it was a custom proprietary one that a lot of people would hire technology staff and the real estate industry. And you'd have to retrain them right away. So they understood this new language that wasn't used anywhere else in the world. And we realized over time that if we were going to really have great advancements in real estate technology and efficiency, we should be using what everybody else in technology uses. These very basic things. This way, we, what we call transportive data. Are we going to share data in a common language that people understand, or are we going to continue to do it in our proprietary way? So the move today is toward web API, which is a modern promise.

Sam DeBord (09:10):

I'll only say this once restful API, but it's something that technologists love when new technology come companies come into the industry, they say, yes, we get this. We know exactly how to do it. When brokers hire technology staff, that staff can come in and work right away in that because they understand how that modern API works. And there's great progress in the industry. Moving forward with that. It'll take time there everybody's got systems in place. It's sort of like those, that plumbing that we talked about the water's working technically. So there's a lot of reds implementations that will be around for a certain amount of time because people just don't want to change what they have, but eventually it becomes problematic with that old technology. So over time, more and more organizations are going to make that move and upgrade their systems through the web API.

Eric Stegemann (09:59):

Great, great feedback. There are great histories there. I think reds gets a bad rap sometimes because you know, it is 2020 and, and Rhett's is still the dominant way of transporting data between two different companies. But you have to remember what Sam said here Rhett's has been around for 20 years. And if you go back 20 years ago, think about the computer that you were using 20 years ago. Think about the phone that you had 20 years ago. And when you think about it, that it was created at that point and that it's still working, you know, fairly well today overall. And I think web API is definitely the way to go, but it's, it's served its purpose for 20 years pretty well. And if you think about all that's in there in terms of data and I, and Sam, I'd love for you to talk a little bit about, I think there's kind of an intermediate item that happened at RESO between Rhett's and web API. I mean the data dictionary, I'd love for you to talk a little about the data dictionary and how well that served both threats and then coming over into now the web API.

Sam DeBord (11:12):

Yeah. I mean, that's, that's a great point. There's, there's a difference between how the data is defined and how we move the data. So Rhett's and wait web API, our transport, that's how we move the data around. But there's also a way of structuring that data. So everybody understands what those words are within the data. Exactly. So the data dictionary has been a huge benefit to the industry. And that's one of our work groups, we've got a web API transport work group. We've got a data dictionary work group, and these are volunteers from all over the industry. Some of them are engineers, developers. Some of them are business executives. And they'll come bring these common terms to us and say you know, we a full daylight basement in our market. And in this area they say, well, we use three quarter basement.

Sam DeBord (12:00):

And we look at all the different terms in the industry and say, how can we coalesce around a common terms? So the data dictionary has been a huge benefit in making sure what we're moving across these transports is, is common so that we can define things like a patio, and maybe we call it a Lanai in Hawaii, and maybe we call it a patio in Cleveland. But in that underlying data set, we've got a field that's common. And so the technology systems understand what that is, and then they can make their local variations, however they need to in terms of reporting. So data dictionary continues to expand. It, it's probably one of our most valuable assets at RESO because of the membership involvement and the community involvement there, we're currently talking to more commercial real estate organizations about expanding that even further as new commercial organizations are joining our membership. We're talking to international organizations who are property search organizations, assessment international and local appraisal organizations that are working with GICs to be able to start defining really broad sets of data and real estate. And again, bring that just greater efficiency to people's systems.

Eric Stegemann (13:16):

And, and just for the brokers that are listening out there to give you an idea from a technological advancement standpoint it used to take us at minimum five hours and on the high side, about 15 hours to map in a new MLS worth of data using red scent and the old way of doing things today, when a vendor is fully data dictionary compliant, there are MLSs that are out there that we can have an entire board of your data, not just mapped in, but downloaded within 15 minutes. It is a massive change into speeding up the technological technology side of RN of being able to replicate that data and get your website or your real estate brokerage CRM or whatever it is up and running so much faster. So the data dictionary definitely a huge advancement, something you probably, as a broker, don't see every day but has, has dramatically sped up the innovation, I think, in the, in the industry. And can't wait to see it now, as it's rolling out into, into web API,

Sam DeBord (14:22):

You definitely see it. You may not realize it, but, you know, as Eric's talking about this you know, his company, obviously as the experience with doing this years and years for broker systems, we would do integrations as a broker at organization. And what you'll, what you'll realize when you start seeing these points is where you bring a new vendor in and they say, well, it's going to take us three months to map your MLS system to what our tool is, or for us to be able to get your agents, you know, company interoffice, mailer, to integrate with some other system that we've got, that is on our backend. We've got this mapping period. When you hear that from your vendors and they can't just light something up in five, 10 minutes, which some of these new companies can do with data dictionary and web API, as a broker you'll know, this is probably a RESO issue. My tools probably are not standardized to RESO standards somewhere in that stack. And that's why my technology folks are taking so much time. It's a reality of, of, of a lot of our situations still that we haven't