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Spotlight: Open Houses

By Nick Church and Mary-Frances Makichen

The National Association of Realtors® has scheduled “National Open House Weekend” for April 28 and 29. This is a great opportunity for Realtors® to showcase the amazing properties currently on the market.

This event actually started in Washington State! For years, several Washington REALTOR® Associations conducted open-house events. They were so successful that the first state-wide open house weekend was held in 2009. In 2010 the concept went national and nearly every state participated. Once again this year the National Association of REALTORS® is helping to promote this event. 2012 will be bigger and better with hundreds of thousands of open houses across the nation and currently in 13 other countries! The event has gone global.

What you may not be aware of is that many real estate websites, including our public site www.rmls.com and the National Association of Realtors® site: www.realtor.com, display open house information. This information comes directly from properly entered open house information in RMLSweb.

We know many of you are going to join in on National Open House weekend and want to remind all subscribers to get the most out of your advertising by making sure your open house information is properly entered in RMLSweb. Check out our “How to Enter an Open House on RMLSweb” tutorial for clear instructions and help.

For some quick tips on holding an open house, check out these ideas from Realtor Magazine .

New Fields and Feature Options Coming Soon to the Listing Input Forms

RMLS™ will no longer be printing contracts or input forms

At RMLS™, we take your feedback very seriously. Every year the Realtors on our Forms Committee review your suggestions regarding changes to the listing contracts and input forms and make recommendations to the Board of Directors. This year they have identified several changes to the forms that will be in effect April 28, including several new feature options and a new field for Energy Efficiency.

In addition, the committee and the Board of Directors carefully reviewed the declining usage of the printed input forms and decided that in order to be more responsive to the real estate market in the future, we will only be publishing the input forms electronically from now on. Printed input forms will no longer be for sale starting on April 15. The electronic forms are available in several formats on RMLSweb:

  • Printable blank PDFs that you can fill in by hand. (If you use this method, you may want to purchase NCR paper from your local office supply store or EMAR so you don’t have to fill them out twice.)
  • e-Forms that can be filled in on your computer and printed out.
  • Print listing agreements from Listing Load.

If you prefer to have them professionally printed yourself, please email frontdesk@rmls.com for a copyright permission letter.

There will be no changes to the contracts or addendum forms at this time. However, we will not be reprinting them in the future. Starting April 15, you may purchase the printed contract pages and addendum forms at a special 2-for-1 rate while supplies last.
More information about the specific field and feature changes will be available shortly. Stay tuned!