MLS Insight is a series about how things work at RMLS™.
At their annual leadership retreat last month, the RMLS™ Board of Directors reviewed a list of potential projects and prioritized those they believe will have the best benefit for RMLS™ subscribers in 2015. Following is a brief description of the three projects that will get the attention of our software development team this year, following their completion of their work on reverse prospecting and the forms changes approved in 2014.
RMLSweb Menu Bar: This project will update the blue menu bar on RMLSweb so it always appears at the top of the screen. No matter what page you are on across the website, the menu will be locked and visible, so that you will not need to scroll up to go to a new location.
Prospecting Improvements: This project will include a variety of improvements to prospecting on RMLSweb, including the following examples:
• Options to refine the frequency of the auto-email to your clients, including days of the week and month as well as the number of times per day;
• Copying an existing profile (as a template) and creating a prospect from Advanced MLS search;
• Performing a reverse prospect search in Listing Load and CMA;
• Setting a minimum price change amount that will trigger a notification message to clients; and
• Customizing the subject line in prospect emails.
View Count Enhancements: This project will allow the listing agent to automatically schedule and email the Listing View Counts report to their seller. The plan is also to enhance functionality by allowing searching view counts by date range. Other goals include investigating the possibility of adding additional data to the reports, such as SentriLock showings and the number of active prospects that match the property.
The next post will focus on Data Distribution services at RMLS™. If you have any questions you would like to have answered, I encourage you to post a comment.
One teeny little helpful thing would be when we are inputting or updating data on listings is if the address for the property would remain visible rather than just the ML#.
Thanks for your comment. Sometimes it is those small things that make a huge difference. We are asking our development team if this can be included in a project this year.
That would be wonderful! I represent a builder so am constantly managing many similar listings. Makes me buggy when I have to go back to remind myself which property I’m on! Or even if our “internal ID” was visible it would be lovely. Or both! :-)
I am puzzled about why I can’t set definitive parameters in my Hotsheet profiles. I check them every morning, and every morning I have to page through several listings that have nothing to do with what I am looking for that my buyers want. Why can’t I define exactly what I am looking for in the exact area that I want to look? Your search system is archaic in this high-tech era. I’ve even had several complaints from tech-savvy buyers trying to narrow down their searches on RMLS.com. This is one of the main reasons that buyers are increasingly using websites such as Zillow or other more recent websites. I hear this all the time from buyers. Please hire someone that has the ability to see that this search engine is ridiculously out-of-touch and time-consuming for agents/buyers and re-write the code to bring it up to today’s client’s standards.
Thanks for your comment. As a Realtor®, if you use the Prospecting function you can be very specific in the property criteria for various buyers. Hotsheet is generally used to get an overview of the status of properties in a geographic area.
Thank you for your response about my searches on RMLSweb.com, but it still doesn’t address my concern about my buyers (one in particular who uses RMLS.com a lot) who also like to search on their own…..can the parameters be tightened up for them?
RMLS™ has had a public website since 1996 that provides a basic interface to our listings for the public. It has been a conscious decision on the part of our Board of Directors to retain the basic nature of RMLS.com and focus resources on our primary customers, our subscribing Realtors®, many of whom have their own websites with IDX listing data available for their buyers and the general public. For future consideration, what fields would your buyers find most useful? I would never expect to see the situation where every field is searchable, as it is for you as a subscriber.
The idea of keeping certain features as “subscriber-only” is always a good idea, but not if it is at the cost of public usability. Currently, the public site is barely useful, especially when compared against resources like realtor.com
This is the most improvement we can expect in an entire year? The Prospecting Improvements are welcome, especially the ability to create a Prospect Profile from an Advanced MLS Search. The rest is only minor tweaking. How about doing something that will really add to our business and our bottom line?
We need to be able to input and search for rental property! That is an entire segment of the real estate market that RMLS ignores. At least once a month I have someone call who is moving here from another state and wants to rent for 6 months to a year and then buy. They want my help in finding a rental. I want to help because they will be good buyers down the road but it is extremely difficult without a centralized database of available rentals. I was a Realtor in Phoenix and we had rentals in our MLS. It was very helpful in the above scenario. Also, when selling a rental property to an investor, I often got the rental listing and then found the tenant for my investor. We were able to offer a complete package of “turn key” service to just about anyone. What’s not to like about being the only point of contact anyone needs regarding any real estate and getting paid to both sell and lease properties?
Thanks for your comment and explanation of how you were able to utilize the rental property that was included in the Arizona Multiple Listing Service. The RMLS™ Board of Directors reviewed the idea of including residential rental property in RMLSweb in February, and decided against it at this time.
My realtor advised that we use RMLS exclusively to search for a new home. The primary reason was that listings are required to be up-to-date. Consider that the search-ability and user-interface of RMLS is nearly 20 years old, it is severely lacking compared to competitors. I’ve spent 3 hours scripting my browser to give me some of the basic functionality offered nearly everywhere else, such as a map, listing age, non-javascript links, etc.
The only reason I’ve put this work in, is the up-to-date information promised by RMLS. However, we have repeatedly found that at least half of the listings wait 2 to 3 days before updating a property’s status. Additionally, there’s no reasonable organization of results. I went through nearly 100 listings on my first visit, only to find that 2 days later, with the same search, I had to go through all the same listings to find the new ones.
These kinds of shortcomings push buyers away from this site, and toward things like realtor.com. However, they are also things that could be easily addressed with an updated user-interface, or even an API so web-developers like me could build our own interface. Check espressoLogic for an easy way to add an API. If neither of those options sound good to the powers at RMLS, at least consider giving a developer like me a crack at building something better.