At the annual RMLS™ 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. Following is a brief description of the three projects that will get the attention of our software development team this year along with a fourth that will be scheduled if possible. The forms changes approved in 2017, Showing Time and the new Coming Soon-No Showing status are also in the works.
Listing Load Enhancements
This project will add ability for authorized users to initiate editing of a listing from Agent Full/Data Only reports and to add/start a new listing from Tax Search, Tax Full, and CMA (subject property/features) page, providing a more streamlined workflow for the agent.
When adding a new listing, the agent will be able to upload PDF documents directly from the input screen, similar to Photo Manager. Agents will also be able to test video/virtual tour links to ensure that they work correctly before saving the listing.
Ever publish a listing and forget to save a copy of the listing contract? Well this project will eliminate that issue by allowing users to print a copy of the listing contract, even after the listing has been published.
RMLS™ will also look for ways to enhance the Tax ID auto-population function to include additional data found from other sources such as comparable listings, map layers, Realtors Property Resource (RPR®) and other data sources.
Search and Prospecting/Auto-Email Enhancements
This project will add the ability to create/save a prospect search from Advanced Search and other saved searches within RMLSweb. In addition, the ability to filter prospect matches based upon price changes falling within a certain range (mimicking the Hotsheet’s price change option) will be added to eliminate notifications of listings that have a daily price change.
We know it’s important to know when a profile is set to expire, so an alert to the subscriber will be sent via email. Advanced search will also see enhancements. Subscribers will be able to search by any public ID or broker code, and when searching by status, days back function, an “apply all” function will be available to make it easier to set the dates for all statuses.
Watch List
This project will add a notes field to each saved watch list item, making it easier to remember why it is being watched. In addition, when a listing is added to the watch list, the tax parcel record will also be included automatically so notifications can be sent if the property is relisted with a different MLS number.
CMA Enhancements
This project will enable the user to adjust the font and font size of the report and include the option to print the 32-Up Photo report. In addition, a notes field will be added to the adjustment section of the CMA for each comparable listing, allowing the user to detail why the adjustment was made. A column will be added to the Recommended Price page of the CMA which will reflect adjustments made.
You’ve found a great potential home for your client, and you know it won’t be on the market long. You want to show it to your client as soon as possible, but 5am is hardly the time to be calling the seller’s agent. If only there was a way to schedule a showing online…
ShowingTime is a new service that is set to roll out on RMLSweb this spring along with other RMLSweb improvements we’ve recently written about. Once released, RMLS™ subscribers will be able to schedule a showing from inside RMLSweb, eliminating the phone tag that can slow down the process of securing a property showing.
Sellers’ agents putting a listing into RMLSweb can—but don’t have to—use ShowingTime to facilitate showings. If ShowingTime is used, a listing agent may choose to make an open schedule (ideal for vacant listings or empty parcels of land), require an appointment during a schedule they set, or display showing instructions only.
Brokers who have found a property with ShowingTime enabled may schedule their showing immediately, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. A showing schedule is available so the property is never mistakingly double-booked, and an instant confirmation with showing instructions is delivered via text or email to both showing agent and listing agent.
Aside from its basic functions, ShowingTime will offer other amenities for RMLS™ subscribers. ShowingTime creates notifications via email, text, or through its mobile app so both agents have a confirmation of a showing. A feature called ShowingCart can help an agent create a tour of properties and other stops the group may want to make, complete with driving directions. Basic showing feedback is solicited and collected in one place for convenience. Listing activity reports are available for properties using ShowingTime, including the ability to export the showing data. Naturally, ShowingTime has a mobile app for iOS and Android with a mobile site available for Windows or Blackberry devices.
RMLS™ subscribers interested in having even more tools can pay for ShowingTime’s premium service which adds the option of brokerage branding, with special ShowingTime tools to offer sellers who want to have more involvement in the process.
Training will be available to RMLS™ subscribers leading up to the rollout through webinars, video tutorials, and standalone tips. Live technical support will also be available seven days a week via phone, email, or chat.
Get ready to schedule showings easily and conveniently once ShowingTime is available later this spring!
RMLS™ subscribers who read our post from earlier this month no doubt have questions about the new status that will debut on RMLSweb in the coming months: Coming Soon-No Showing, or CSN. We’re ready to outline some key details, answer some questions, and talk about what this new status will mean for RMLSweb, listing forms, and subscribers.
THE BASICS
The Coming Soon-No Showing (CSN) status is for short-term use. Subscribers may use CSN to prepare a listing for Active (ACT) status. The listing may be in CSN status for no longer than 21 days and must have a valid listing agreement as well as seller approval. CSN status will indicate the listing firm and seller(s) are preparing the property for sale and marketing before the listing becomes active on RMLSweb. As such, CSN will be considered an off-market status as the listing is not actively being marketed and is not ready to be shown. Affiliate subscribers will not be able to view listings that are in CSN status, nor will CSN listings be included in statistical searches and reports.
USING CSN ON RMLSWEB
A listing agent will have the choice to publish a property as CSN. All required fields will still be required for a CSN listing and must follow all other input business rules. The required first photo will bear a watermark saying “Coming Soon-No Showings.” The Oregon and Washington listing contracts will be updated to allow seller(s) to choose between publishing the listing as ACT or CSN in RMLSweb or to exclude the property from the MLS.
Listings can stay in CSN status for up to 21 days. Listing Load will not allow a date further than 21 days in the future from being entered as the list date. If a listing agent submits a list date of fewer than 21 days in the future, the agent may extend the list date up until that 21st day—something that may come in handy if more time is needed to prep a property than was originally estimated.
The status of a CSN listing may be manually changed to ACT or WTH at any time during the 21 day period. When the list date is reached or the listing has been in the system for 21 days RMLSweb will automatically change the status of the listing to ACT at midnight. Once a listing is out of CSN status it cannot be reverted back, nor can properties that were once in CSN status be re-entered as a new CSN listing (exceptions: the property has expired or has been withdrawn for over 90 days; the property has been relisted with a new brokerage; or the property has been sold).
Open houses and broker tour offerings cannot be set up in Listing Load for a listing in CSN status. Listing View Count reports will still be available showing viewing counts from within RMLSweb, but Days on Market (DOM)/Cumulative Days on Market (CDOM) will not accrue while a listing is in CSN status.
RMLSWEB SEARCH AND CSN
CSN will not be included in the default status criteria when doing a new search—ACT and BMP will remain the two default statuses. CSN listings will be excluded from exported reports and consumer prospecting auto-emails. CSN can be searched with other statuses, included in a user’s watch list. CSN listings may be used to conduct a reverse prospect search or using Hotsheet. CSN listings are included in agent-only prospect notifications. CSN listing reports can be printed and emailed from RMLSweb, including client reports. The listings will state “no showings permitted” in showing instructions on agent reports, with the actual showing instructions hidden while in CSN status.
DATA FEEDS
CSN listings will be excluded from data feeds, including but not limited to RMLS.com, Realtor.com, HomeSpotter, IDX, VOW, and broker specific feeds.
AUTHORIZATION TO EXCLUDE
Listing agents will be able to submit the completed Authorization to Exclude from MLS Addendum directly into Listing Load on RMLSweb, eliminating the need to email or mail a copy to RMLS™. If a property is excluded, it will be for the full length of the listing contract, as the short-term option on the addendum will be eliminated. The listing firm may list the property as active again once 30 days from the form’s expiration date have passed.
RMLS™ is excited to announce that our development team has started work on several projects which will be released on RMLSweb this spring.
On the surface these projects look very different, but as they require some bigger back-end changes to the website, we’ll be rolling them into one project that should make a big splash with RMLS™ subscribers once it all goes live.
Creation of a new listing status, Coming Soon/No Showing, was approved by the RMLS™ Board of Directors in September. This new status will mean changes to the RMLS™ Rules and Regulations as well as the Authorization to Exclude from MLS Addendum.
Subscriber comments are given to the Forms Committee, then recommendations are approved by the RMLS™ board. This year’s changes were approved in November, and highlights include updated language to listing contracts, improved addendums, terminology changes, and some new features and small changes to other fields in RMLSweb.
ShowingTime is coming to RMLSweb! ShowingTime makes the scheduling of showings easy for everyone. RMLS™ subscribers can edit and control the showing schedule on their own listings, reducing calls and the inevitable phone tag. Using ShowingTime will be optional, so subscribers who would rather schedule showings offline will still be able to do so.
Watch RMLScentral and the RMLSweb desktop page in the coming weeks, as we’ll be discussing each piece of this larger project in more detail. If you have a question about any of these, leave it for us below!
Here we go again! RMLS™ celebrates another year working hard for thousands of subscribers across Oregon and Southwest Washington by presenting an annual collection of numbers. These numbers show just how much RMLS™ has supported real estate activity over the course of 2017. We hope you enjoyed journeying along with us.
RMLSweb
Number of times subscribers logged in to RMLSweb: 1,761,465
Photos uploaded to listings: 1,838,307
Number of new prospect profiles created: 75,970
All residential properties listed for sale: 75,657
All residential properties sold: 58,691
Median sold price of homes listed: $330,000
Total dollar volume of homes sold: $21,693,925,000
Reports viewed: 9,414,184
RMLS™ Subscribers
RMLS™ subscribers as of December 2017: 13,973
New RMLS™ subscribers (compared to December 2016): 620
Increase in subscribers, above: +4.65
Subscribers who attended training: 4,489
Number of calls to the RMLS™ Help Desk: 21,105
Number of Help Desk chats: 4,417
Number of incidents reported using the “Report Issue” button: 7,669
CE hours distributed by RMLS™ at no cost to subscribers: 3,114
Total attendance at RMLS™ training events: 4,489
RMLS.com
Total customer visits to RMLS.com: 2,556,344
Unique visits: 961,958
Total listing views: 1,498,074
RMLS™ regularly compiles plenty of other numbers as well! In addition to publishing Market Action each month, we have statistical summaries available on RMLSweb with information dating back several years.
We love numbers here at RMLS™, and hope you find this data as fun and interesting as we do.
Ask Technical Terry is a series RMLS™ aims to offer once a month. RMLS™ subscribers will drive the content—submit any question about RMLS™ to Technical Terry in the comments or by emailing communications@rmls.com. Don’t be shy—we won’t identify you by name.
Dear TT-
I’m hoping you can clear up some questions I have about Prospecting/Auto Email. First, I have a hard time understanding the difference between the two terms. Can you help with that? It seems like they’re used interchangeably and they can’t both mean the same thing! (Can they?) Second, I suspect I’m not setting up my clients correctly because they never seem to get the first set of listings that match the criteria I’ve set up for them. What should I do?
Struggling in Stayton
Dear SS-
I’m happy to help! And I hear you about those two terms being used interchangeably. Let’s start with the term “prospecting.” Prospecting is simply a set of search criteria you’ve saved in RMLSweb in the Prospecting Profile module. In most cases you will name the saved criteria something related to a specific client.
Remember to NOT use your client’s full name here, because if you allow Reverse Prospecting (I know, another confusing term) and your client’s search criteria matches the descriptive elements of a listing being reversed prospected, the subscriber running the reverse prospecting search would be able to see your client’s entire name! Just their name, nothing else, but still probably not a good idea!
Are we good here with that the term “prospecting” means in RMLSweb? Let’s move on.
Now how do I use this set of saved search criteria going forward? In most cases you will associate this Prospecting Profile with a contact in your saved contacts on RMLSweb, and then set up Auto Email, the process whereby RMLSweb searches and automatically sends out listing matches to your client. (Note that you can associate up to five unique contacts per Prospecting Profile!) You could add the client info in Contact Manager (Toolkit->Contact Manager) before or after creating the Prospecting profile—whichever works for you.
Once you’ve chosen a saved contact or created a new contact to add to the Prospecting Profile you can then set up the Auto Email variables. You have a lot of choices here: frequency of delivery, type of client report, whether to CC yourself, customization of the subject line, and so on.
Here’s a key piece of information for you, SS: only new matches will be sent to your client(s) on the day(s) chosen in the Auto Email setup. The initial matches must be selected manually and sent in a separate email message!
Once you have this process set up and running automatically, RMLSweb will alert you of new matches by illuminating the New Prospect Matches button in the upper left corner of the RMLSweb desktop page. You may also be receiving the emails if you chose to CC yourself when setting up the Auto Email. If you did not choose to be copied on the emails you can still view the email history by navigating to Prospecting Profiles, finding the contact name, and clicking “History” in the contact record.
I sure hope this info helps. Remember that we have a variety of documents in RMLSweb covering all of this. The following are particularly excellent resources for your question:
