Realtors Property Resource LLC (RPR) has signed up the Houston Association of Realtors as a partner, bringing the number of residential multiple listing services (MLSs) and commercial information exchanges (CIEs) participating in the national property database to 425.
RPR, a subsidiary of the National Association of Realtors, says it now has data licensing agreements in place with MLSs and CIEs representing about 65 percent of NAR’s 1 million or so members.
Like other participating MLSs, HAR — the second-largest local Realtor association in the country with 24,000 members — will feed active and historical listings data to RPR.
RPR will aggregate that data to generate analytics reports, and also give HAR members access to tax assessment and public property records; records on mortgages, liens and foreclosures; school boundary data; flood maps; aerial and geocoded imagery; and demographic information.
"We decided to offer RPR because we believe that the multiple sources of information provided by RPR on a national level can be of great benefit to the Realtors working in Houston and its numerous contiguous market areas serviced by HAR," said HAR CEO Bob Hale in a statement.
In the last 90 days, RPR has also signed agreements with St. Louis-based MLS Mid-America Regional Information Systems (MARIS); Charlotte, N.C.-based Carolina MLS; Parsippany, N.J.-based Garden State MLS, and the Clearwater, Fla.-based Pinellas Realtor Organization, the company said. RPR went live for San Diego-area MLS Sandicor earlier this summer.
There is no exact date set for RPR to go live with HAR MLS data yet. Typical implementation time averages between eight and 12 weeks, RPR said. HAR has also signed up for two rival initiatives, Partner InfoNet from data aggregator CoreLogic, and "Find," a search platform from Realtor.com operator Move Inc., Hale told Inman News.
Both RPR and CoreLogic’s Partner InfoNet aim to generate revenue by using historical listing data to generate analytics on housing markets and providing those analytics to lenders, Wall Street investors, and government agencies.
CoreLogic is sharing revenue with MLSs and Realtor associations that provide listing data to Partner InfoNet, with more generous splits reserved for those that provide data on an exclusive basis.
Instead of a revenue split, Move and RPR are offering partners providing historical listings access to tools, such as RPR’s database and Realtor.com’s Find.
RPR is set to launch for all NAR members, regardless of MLS participation, on Nov. 1. Realtors whose MLSs haven’t signed on to the project will be able to access public property records, but not historical listing data, by signing on to RPR using their NRDS (National Realtors Database System) ID. The database will be available only to Realtors.
