The National Association of Realtors has flipped the switch for the first two multiple listing services to go live on its Realtors Property Resource property database, and is planning to add about 15 MLSs a week by November.
But Realtors whose MLSs haven’t signed on to the project won’t be able to sign in to a Web-based version of the database using their NRDS (National Realtors Database System) ID until the fourth quarter of 2011.
More than 100 MLSs representing 265,000 Realtors have signed up for RPR, licensing their historic listings data to NAR subsidiary RPR LLC in exchange for member access to the 150 million-parcel database.
All of those MLSs are expected to go live with RPR this year, said Mona Steen, RPR senior vice president of industry relations, in a blog post. The first two MLSs to go live last week were Sunnyvale, Calif.-based MLSListings Inc. and Michigan’s Monroe County Association of Realtors.
"We’ve structured our launch calendar to try to keep the number of new Realtors logging in to RPR at about 50,000 per week" to ensure that RPR’s call center can provide adequate support.
Steen said once an MLS has signed a licensing agreement, it takes about four weeks to map an MLS’s data, integrating its active and sold listings data with RPR’s national property tax and other datasets.
RPR also works with MLSs for up to two months prior to launch on decisions like whether to incorporate single sign-on, what data-sharing arrangements will be put in place, and what the MLS-branded view of RPR will look like.
Each MLS can decide whether to make its own active and off-market listings data available to all RPR users, restrict it to only their own members, or make it available to specific MLS members based on agreements they may have in place with other MLSs, Steen told Inman News.
Those business rules can be applied separately to four different categories of data: active, off-market, confidential, and "Realtor valuation model" (RVM) property valuations. MLS decide how they want each data field they are providing to RPR to be categorized.
The system allows an MLS to share active listing data with all RPR users, for example, but share off-market and confidential data fields only with members of specific MLSs with which they have data-sharing agreements.
The business rules governing the distribution of the four categories of data can be easily changed, Steen said, and RPR plans to launch an "MLS Dashboard" next year that will allow the MLSs to make changes themselves.
Realtors whose MLSs aren’t participating in RPR will still be able to log into the database late next year, but won’t see active or historic listing data for their market. They may see listings data from participating MLSs, but only if those MLSs have chosen to make it available to them.
At least six MLSs have elected not to join RPR for now, signing on to a competing venture from data aggregator CoreLogic that offers them a share of revenue.
Atlanta’s First Multiple Listing Service (FMLS), North Texas Real Estate Information Systems (NTREIS), Greater Las Vegas Association of Realtors (GLVAR), Northern Ohio Regional MLS (NORMLS), Ohio’s Centralized Real Estate Information Services (CRIS), and Maine’s Downeast MLS (DMLS) have entered into agreements to provide historic listing data to CoreLogic on an exclusive basis.
Realtor.com operator Move Inc. is also seeking to license historical listings data from MLSs, this week announcing it has licensing agreements in place or in the works with 17 MLSs representing 238,000 subscribers.
