Listing Sydication Gets Easier

Posting your listings online should be a standard procedure. From a marketing point of view, the more places a listing appears, the better. The downside is that if you want your listings on half a dozen sites, you have to enter listings manually on each site or invest money in developing an automated system. And if the price changes, you’ll need to update each site individually. So even if you want your listings everywhere online, the amount of time you have to invest in posting and updating often makes widespread listing aggregation more trouble than it's worth.

Fortunately, some powerhouses in the listing aggregation realm recognized this problem. In January 2008, Google, Yahoo, Zillow, and Trulia began working together to create a single, standardized feed that would facilitate the marketing and advertising of properties on multiple Web sites. With help from the National Association of REALTORS® and the newly formed Real Estate Standards Organization (RESO), they've achieved their goal in record time.

The key to making standardization a reality is determining which data elements create the basic feed for each site and then developing a specification around those elements. The final specification contains fewer than two dozen required fields and only about 100 fields in total. To make it more robust, the specification very closely parallels, and draws from where possible, the existing Real Estate Transaction Standard (RETS) Data Schema developed by RESO in conjunction with MLS vendors and other industry stakeholders. However, this RETS schema is much more comprehensive, containing more than 1,000 data fields.

Already the new standard is having an effect. More than a dozen other listing sites and vendors have joined the RETS syndication workgroup and will begin accepting or implementing this universal listing feed in the near future. For real estate practitioners, this collaboration means that property information has to be changed in only one place to reach all participating sites. You save time and prospective buyers always have the most current and accurate property information.

In time, the new syndication specification could also be adopted by MLS systems. If this occurs, the MLS could become the single point of data transfer to all listing sites. The process would be similar to the way listings are now fed to REALTOR.com® but would occur across a much broader scope of sites.

Going one step further, a joint project between CRT and New England-based MLSPIN is developing a simpler data exchange method that’s more closely geared to listing syndication than RETS. This work is very similar to the successful and easily implemented data transfer that sites such as Trulia and Zillow have been working with for the last couple years.

The goal of the RETS Syndication Specification and the new streamlined data exchange method is to minimize the time and effort real estate practitioners must spend to transfer listings geared around advertising and marketing. This change will ultimately increase listing exposure while reducing the burdens of technology and cost.

-This article is written by Chris McKeever and is from NAR's Center for REALTOR® Technology (CRT) newsletter for Spring 2008