When you buy a new toaster, you don't worry about whether the plug will fit in the kitchen outlet or if your home has the right kind of electricity. You rely on a set of standards adopted by appliance manufacturers and utility companies to ensure that their products and power sources work together. This is not the case with real estate information.
TREND provides listing data to many sources on your behalf, such as IDX website vendors, newspapers, showing centers and lockbox systems. Many of these recipients secure data from other MLSs, each with a unique format and delivery method. In other words, these sources receive data with different electricity and need many different plugs in order to use it.
TREND Moves to RETS
In order to help everyone who receives listing data to work with the various sources in a more efficient manner, a standard for real estate data as created called the Real Estate Transaction Standard, or RETS.
TREND will now deliver listing data in the RETS format to outside recipients, including IDX website vendors, newspapers and REALTOR.com. This brings them one step closer to using one type of electricity and one plug.
It will make tasks like populating websites, generating print advertisements and organizing transaction services more accurate and more efficient.
What You Need to Know About RETS
RETS was developed to make the process of transferring listing data smoother. The standard establishes guidelines so that programmers and companies who work with real estate data can do so using the same rules. They do not define what the program should do, just as the electrical standards do not specify whether an appliance should make toast or brew coffee. They define how.
The National Association of REALTORS
® (NAR) initiated RETS in March 1999 to promote a technology environment that will prepare REALTORS
® to become managers of the electronic transaction. Additionally, NAR has mandated that all MLSs must be RETS compliant by June 2009.
How You Will Benefit From RETS
In today's fast-paced world, having timely and accurate information available on your website is critical. RETS offers the capability to have more frequent updates made to the MLS content on your website. For example, price changes, status changes, and photo changes can be updated much more frequently than once a day. With RETS, consumers who come to your website will view the most up-to-date information.
If your company receives data from multiple sources, RETS also provides an easier way for your vendor to manage your listings. Instead of creating and maintaining custom interfaces for each set of MLS data, your vendor can use one interface to manage multiple RETS data sources. They will be able to work with each data set in less time, and that will save you money.
For those brokers who conduct business across the boundaries of several MLSs, the possibility exists to only need one data set. Additionally, RETS has the potential of delivering one set of data to your vendor from multiple sources. As TREND works toward sharing data with surrounding MLSs, more brokers working across the TREND border will be able to get one set of RETS data that contains all the listings they need, again saving time and money.
What RETS Means to You
If you are operating a website that is displaying information supplied by TREND, there may be short-term costs to implement RETS. If you are exploring the possibility of purchasing a website and wanting to display information supplied by TREND, we suggest you ask the vendor if they are RETS compliant. Many IDX website vendors are already working with RETS data. Those vendors who are not familiar with RETS will need to take time to familiarize themselves with it.
All vendors will need to make behind-the-scenes changes to accommodate this new delivery method. As a result, you might incur additional costs.
If you use a website vendor, be sure to talk to them as TREND's transition to RETS could affect your financial arrangement with them. However, should your vendor not have a viable product or pricing solution, this change affords you the opportunity to explore other alternatives.
Utilizing RETS will increase the efficiency and accuracy of products and services that use listing data. RETS creates a way to easily share information, allowing you to focus more time on using the data and less time on getting the data.
Read more about TREND's use of RETS in
News Document #741, "TREND Signs Cooperative Agreement to Share Listing Data with MRIS."