Single Point of Entry and Aggregated Listings

Click here for the full white paper

Executive Summary

The last few years have been challenging times for the MLS as each organization adjusted to the realities of the real estate market while trying to meet increased expectations from our subscriber communities. Subscribers see the types of data, technologies, and analytics made available to their consumer base and wonder when that level playing field can be provide to them, as well what additional tools their Brokers and their MLS can offer to help them maintain their productivity and credibility.

For northern California MLSs specifically, these times were also marked with opening inroads with the way we cooperate with one another. Most recently finalizing residential listings from East Bay with the Quattro and MLSListings aggregated listings database.

We believe the time is ripe for continuing the cooperation amongst our northern California MLSs to work on the next major projects at hand. These projects focus on efficiency on the backend so that the Broker and MLS communities can offer foundation listing data in a more cost-effective and centralized manner; thereby potentially increasing our individual abilities to invest in more value added data and services for our subscribers. In this whitepaper, we examine the options available to us, with sample cases where they have been implemented, and lessons learned from those cases.

We will also introduce a proposed organizational structure called NewCo, comprised of equal ownership between the seven MLSs in northern California, to drive forward a Single Point of Entry (SPE) and single aggregated listings backbone with consolidated data from these MLSs to create a MLS-centric data management model. This new shell corporation would manage the SPE solution and define its long term functionality; create standard MLS rules and regulations; and manage the functionality of the listing input, listing distribution, and ongoing database backend requirements. NewCo would also cover the costs to operate and maintain the SPE solution.

With this proposed technology backend consolidation solution, brokers/agents can easily navigate and manage through this new data structure to deliver timely, accurate and complete information to their real estate clients.

What do you think? Post comments below.