MLS Insight: REALTOR® Agent Profiles and Financial Calculators

MLS Insight is a series about how things work at RMLS™.

One of the thing I enjoy most about writing this column is the ability to provide extra-early notifications of upcoming changes. So when the Board of Directors approves a new program or there is some other significant change coming, you can get a heads up well in advance of implementation. We told you about the new mapping in July, and there are now two more improvements to RMLS™ services to share with you. Both should be available before the end of the year.

REALTOR® Agent Profiles

At their August meeting, the RMLS™ Board of Directors approved the addition of links to the REALTOR® agent profiles being collected by Realtor.com. They will appear in the Find A REALTOR® section of RMLS.com, in the RMLSweb roster, and possibly on report banners. When accessed through an RMLS™ avenue, the Agent Passport will not be branded with the Realtor.com logo. If you want to get a jump on creating your profile, there is a there is a quick start guide on Realtor.com.

Financial Calculators on RMLSweb

A little history… Since our earliest days, RMLS™ Directors have consistently promoted inclusion of a robust set of financial tools for RMLS™ subscribers. It has not always been easy to reach this goal. The first tools provided were released in 1994 and were called PC Financials. A DOS 3.5″ floppy disk was provided at no charge to each subscriber. The 90s were the decade when Windows took over computing, so it was not long before the attempt was made to recreate these financial functions in a Windows-based program. These attempts were not met with success before RMLS™ migrated totally to its current web-based MLS system, RMLSweb in 2002.  A set of financial tools was licensed and added to the system that same year, and those same tools still live in the Toolkit menu. Over the next decade, the company licensing the tools to RMLS™ changed hands several times and eventually we lost the ability to effectively update and repair the program. It was not multi-browser compatible, and many subscribers attempting to utilize the tools got an error message instead.

Fast forward to 2014. The RMLS™ Board of Directors remained firm in its belief that RMLS™ should provide robust financial tools for subscribers. After surveying the marketplace for other alternatives, RMLS™ took the opportunity offered in June 2014 to assume in-house control of the code for the tools we were already using. The first improvement was to make the tools available through multiple browsers, which happened in January this year. Next we hired a researcher to update the default values, and I am happy to announce that those values will be updated and much more accurate later this year. Stay tuned to the RMLS™ Weekly Report for more information.

If you have questions on any RMLS™-related topic that you would like to have answered, I encourage you to post a comment.