RMLS™ Forms Committee Chair Maureen Bonfiglio (left) works with RMLS™ staff member Christina Smestad to plan 2015 committee strategy.

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

The RMLS™ Forms Committee is responsible primarily for what information is collected in Listing Load on RMLSweb. They also consider how that information is available for searching, as well as the contract language in the Exclusive Right to Sell agreement that RMLS™ provides.

Maureen Bonfiglio, RMLS™ Director and Chair of the Forms Committee for the past two years, has actually been a member of the committee for more than ten years. She has reviewed and discussed thousands of suggestions in that time. In her words, “the RMLS Forms Committee is instrumental in providing the best venue possible for the successful marketing of homes for sale. Each year dedicated REALTORS® volunteer their time to serve on this committee to review suggestions from RMLS™ subscribers and address real estate trends. We encourage you to email us with any suggestion you feel would enhance the listing input or provide important information to our membership about a property. If you would like to serve on this committee please contact Christina Smestad at RMLS™.”

The 2015 Forms Committee will meet later in the summer. It usually takes two or three two-hour meetings to review and discuss all the suggestions.

Last year, for example, the committee reviewed about 170 suggestions over the course of two meetings. The work of the committee resulted in 47 recommendations for changes to the collection and searchability of property information, which were all approved by the RMLS™ Board of Directors in November 2014.

Changes approved include additional tax ID fields to denote parcels included with the listing, additional fields in several of the supplement forms, additional values in several fields, and an increased number of value choices in several fields (i.e., increasing Garage Description maximum choices from one to three, and Lot Description from one to two.) Search improvements include a streamlined search for residential listings with dual or multi-household living possibilities and any bedroom on the main floor.

A special subcommittee reviewed the Green/Energy Efficiency fields with the objective of aligning our fields with national efforts by NAR and NAR’s Green REsource Council. This will result in a new Green/Energy Supplement for RMLS™.

You will see most of those changes at the end of July. Two of the recommendations will be released shortly after that. The ability to add up to 24 photos will coincide with the release of updated photo-loader functionality. A new status – Pending Lease Option (POP) – will also be released a little later. Because accepted offers with lease option terms tend to stay in Pending status for extended periods of time, the new status will provide better information about them and better statistics for the accepted offers with other terms.

There has been a standing Forms Committee at RMLS™ since 1991, when our multiple listing service began. This goes a long way to account for the rich dataset RMLS™ maintains about property listed by our subscribers.

The next post will focus on mapping in RMLSweb. If you have questions on any RMLS™-related topic that you would like to have answered, I encourage you to post a comment.

“Where did my in-progress listing go? I’ve entered it three times and now I can’t find it again!”

The RMLS™ Help Desk frequently receives calls like this, and we’re happy to announce that one of the new features being released on RMLSweb Wednesday, May 27th should solve this frustrating issue.

In-Progress Listing Changes

Help Desk Technician Joanne Fulgaro reports the Help Desk receives over 50 calls a month from subscribers unable to find a listing they had saved in their in-progress list. “This was not only time consuming, but frustrating for our subscribers,” she notes.

After Help Desk staff describes a work-around to access the correct listing, the subscriber could then continue their work where they left off. (At this point, multiple in-progress listings for the same property would exist.) As of Thursday this work-around will not be needed, as the in-progress listings page will function differently, displaying the most recently saved in-progress listing at the top (above).

Sidebar Improvements

Subscribers will also notice changes to the right sidebar of the RMLSweb desktop page starting Thursday. A new tabbed interface allows users to toggle between sidebar features without scrolling. The system will keep the last accessed tab at the top, so if a user only uses a certain feature of the sidebar, the tab will remain on top when they come back. A front/back toggle button also means subscribers utilizing custom columns on searches can send the sidebar behind their search results if needed.

Responsive Menu Bar

Finally, on Thursday we’ll be changing the way the RMLSweb menu bar behaves. Users who tire of scrolling up each page to access different parts of RMLSweb will rejoice, as the menu bar will remain fixed at the top of the browser window for convenience. This was a project prioritized for 2015 by the RMLS™ Board of Directors.

We’re always trying to make RMLSweb better for subscribers, and hope this latest round of changes will be helpful. Subscribers can always contact the RMLS™ Help Desk at (503) 872-8002 or (877) 256-2169 with questions or suggestions for future improvements.

DON’T FORGET: the monthly RMLSweb outage usually scheduled during the last Wednesday of each month from 10pm-2am Thursday will be a little longer this month. RMLS™ technicians will not only be executing new features to the site and performing system maintenance, but also replacing hardware. RMLSweb will be in maintenance mode from 10pm Wednesday, May 27th until 4am Thursday, May 28th.

Distribution Services Staff Kim Hutchinson and Jeff Mitchell.

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

Distribution Services at RMLS™ facilitates and manages the electronic transfer of RMLS™ listings outside of RMLSweb. RMLS™ listings appear on the internet and are utilized in applications that support REALTORS®—all in accordance with agreements between RMLS™, our real estate firm participants, and third party vendors. Currently we have almost 6,000 active data access agreements.

When RMLS™ began serving REALTORS® in 1991, there were no property listings on the internet. In fact, as natural and universal as the internet now seems, the World Wide Web was only invented in 1989 and it was not until 1993 that commercial providers were allowed to sell internet connections to individuals. That is when the explosion began in earnest and web traffic over the internet increased by 300,000%.

At RMLS™, an internet presence was approved by the Board of Directors in November 1995, and the first appearance of RMLS™ listings occurred in late April 1996. The internet created radical change in the way business was conducted in many industries, and 1998 was a year of intense discussion and debate in the real estate community about how the internet could and should be integrated into the multiple listing service. That November, the consensus from those discussions became the first RMLS™ Internet Policy. It put the brokerage in the driver’s seat. The basic premise of that first policy—that no listings would be posted on internet without the consent of the participating firm—remains the guiding principle for data distribution today.

Today, RMLS™ listing data is utilized in a variety of ways by our participants. Many offices and individual brokers have their own websites, where they display the listing data according to the IDX (Internet Data Exchange) and/or VOW (Virtual Office Website) policies. These policies are hammered out by National Association of REALTORS®. Firms may also instruct us to send only their own listings to various internet portals or syndication aggregators. This is how listings are funneled to sites like Zillow, Homes.com, OregonLive, etc. Firms can also request data sets to drive products that are used internally, with no consumer display. These can include statistical analysis, AVM creation, CRM programs, transaction management platforms, etc. Because Distribution Services is not part of the core MLS service, data access fees are charged that offset the expense of the program. The service providers, not the subscribers, pay these access fees.

Jeff Mitchell, Distribution Services Technician, manages all the agreements and administers the flow of data. Jeff says that when our subscribers ask about the format of the IDX data, he explains “RMLS™ makes IDX data available in a raw data format, so you will need an IDX Service Provider to process and populate this data on your website.”  Forms and Documents on RMLSweb has a list of IDX service providers that are already established with RMLS™. Each of these service providers offer different services, as well as different monthly fees. We are also happy to work with new providers, but it takes some time for them to ramp up.

Kim Hutchinson, Data Quality Technician, works with the RETS computer that dishes up the data. Kim, along with other staff at RMLS™, work closely with RESO, the Real Estate Standards Organization, whose mission is the standardization of both the process and real estate data that is distributed. This benefits our subscribers by increasing the variety of tools and applications available to them.

The Distribution Services department is committed facilitating the flow of our participants’ listings outward in accordance with their direction and with timeliness, quality, and efficiency. You can contact Distribution Services via email or by phone at 503-872-8053.

The next post will focus on the RMLS™ Forms Committee. If you have questions on any RMLS™-related topic that you would like to have answered, I encourage you to post a comment.

Old homestead buildings along Haggerty Lane, Sherman County.

RMLS™ recently added Sherman County to its tax database, meaning RMLSweb now boasts complete tax information for the state of Oregon!

What does this mean for RMLS™ subscribers? Listings in Sherman County will auto-populate some public records information in Listing Load, making the listing broker’s job a little easier.

A few facts about Sherman County:
• The county was named for General William Tecumseh Sherman.
• When Wasco County settlers wanted to have their own political process, Sherman County was carved out of the northeast corner of Wasco County.
• Sherman County covers 831 square miles, with an assessed value of $433,693,873.
• Much of Sherman County is prime wheat-growing land, but the county is also known for scenic views and outdoor recreation.
(Source: Oregon Blue Book Online)

We’re happy to have Sherman County in the system. In 2003, RMLSweb only had public records for 10 Oregon counties and Washington’s Clark County. Today, we boast public records for all 36 Oregon counties and seven Washington counties!

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.

Wanda Kennedy and Vallerie Bush – the RMLS™ Data Accuracy Team

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

The accuracy of data in listings posted by RMLS™ is something we take very seriously. Data accuracy makes the MLS real estate marketplace hum with the least possible friction. Because we understand that the reason we have rules and regulations is to facilitate a fair and efficient platform for our REALTOR® subscribers, RMLS™ has always focused on education and data correction instead of punishment and income for the MLS.

In fact, we renamed our Rules and Regulations Department to the Data Accuracy Department to reflect this mission!

Of course we still have a process for taking formal complaints—the standing Rules and Regulations Committee to review complaints and impose sanctions (fines in most cases), and the Hearings Committee, whose job it is to conduct hearings if sanctions are appealed. (Hearings are conducted in substantial accordance with the procedures applicable to Professional Standards.) This year, the Rules and Regulations Committee is chaired by RMLS™ Director Rick Jenkins and the Hearings Committee is chaired by RMLS™ Director Mark Meek.

However, the great majority of the work of the data accuracy process is proactive at RMLS™. We respond to all inquiries, questions, and complaints from our subscribers and also conduct regular audits and data checks. To give you some idea of the scope of this effort, here are some numbers from 2014 to ponder:

• Our Data Accuracy staff, Vallerie Bush and Wanda Kennedy, responded to more than 8,000 issues—an average about 670 per month.
• Of these, about 5,300 came from the REPORT ISSUE button that appears on the lower right corner of all Agent Full reports in RMLSweb.
• The department took over 3,100 phone calls.
• In proactive audits, 399,541 listings were reviewed and 6,400+ violations identified. (For frame of reference, 81,594 listings were added to RMLSweb in 2014.)

We also try to analyze Listing Load to prevent inaccuracies at the data collection source if we can. For example, we have blocked the ability to mark both Short Sale and Bank Owned/REO with a YES at the same time. Entry of a sold price with a +10% difference from the listing price will produce a warning message. If the property type INPARK is selected, then the style options become limited to the manufactured home types.

The system also runs auto-checks for certain potential issues upon the publishing/saving of a listing, automatically sending an email to the listing agent to alert them of a possible problem. Emails are automatically sent when there is a missing school, missing tax ID, or when the status has been pending (PEN) for over 3 months.

News Flash! One of the reasons for an extended pending is a lease option. The Board of Directors approved a new status for pending listings with lease option terms.  The “POP” status will be available later in 2015.

One of the responsibilities of the Data Accuracy Department is to comb for possible fair housing violations. Some history is relevant here. In 1995, RMLS™ entered into a conciliation agreement after a fair housing complaint. The particular complaint was due to a listing that advertised “available for adults over 40.” As a result, RMLS™ promised to conduct fair housing/HUD checks on all listings in the future and to promote fair housing on RMLSweb. RMLS™ also paid $30,000 in the settlement, which was a lot of money for a company only three years old. Today, there is a list of words that are flagged in Listing Load upon the publishing/editing of listing remarks. Staff members review a system-generated fair housing/HUD file daily with a more extensive list of possible word violations, and all remarks (public, private, supplemental remarks) are reviewed.

Data accuracy makes RMLS™ better. I encourage you to click the REPORT ISSUE button if you think you see a possible problem on a listing. If it isn’t really an issue we’ll let you know, and if it is we will contact the listing agent to get that data corrected! You will remain anonymous, unless you are submitting a formal violation report that you intend to have reviewed by the Rules and Regulations Committee.

The next post will focus on RMLSweb development projects that were approved by the Board of Directors for 2015. If you have any questions you would like to have answered, I encourage you to post a comment.

RE Technology debuted on RMLSweb last month—a free resource for RMLS™ subscribers interested in harnessing technology for their benefit.

RE Technology is a portal accessible through RMLSweb that allows subscribers to access information, reviews, and product ratings of available real estate technology products—similar to Consumer Reports or CNET. Visitors to the site may access product reviews, a directory of companies offering services to the real estate industry, webinars, and more.

Access RE Technology on RMLSweb either by looking in the Toolkit menu or in the left sidebar under Links.

Keep on Top of Consumer Trends

Together, RE Technology and RMLS™ are providing subscribers free, unlimited access to information about real estate technology. Subscribers can use RE Technology to find case studies and testimonials from other REALTORS® about products that are having an impact on consumers.

If you put the consumer first in your business, you will win! RE Technology helps by allowing subscribers to learn about technology tools before buying them. With RE Technology, subscribers can find out what other REALTORS® say, review product ratings, view recorded webinars, or even reach out to an expert to answer questions.

Get More Comfortable with Technology

RE Technology makes researching technology easy for today’s busy professional. A product directory gives access to information about every product listed by almost every company in real estate, organized by (currently) 98 categories. These categories allow subscribers to browse dozens of product listings, each with user ratings from other REALTORS®.

Search for New Products

RE Technology has more than 2,500 products listed in the product directory, accessible by category. Subscribers can ask questions, see product ratings, rate products directly, schedule product demonstrations, participate in webinars with other REALTORS®, and more.

Not convinced? Check out RE Technology’s Top 10 Articles of 2014 for a sample of their offerings.

How much work does RMLS™ do for thousands of subscribers across Oregon and Southwest Washington? This is the second year we’ve compiled numbers to show just how much RMLS™ has supported real estate activity over the course of a single year (read RMLS™ by the Numbers 2013).

RMLSweb
Number of times subscribers logged in to RMLSweb: 1,475,802
Photos uploaded to listings: 1,138,099
Property searches run: 513,354
Number of new prospect profiles created: 63,943
All residential properties listed for sale: 69,541
All residential properties sold: 48,052
Median sold price of homes listed: $251,000
Total dollar volume of homes sold: $14,067,725,000
Unique tax searches: 107,750
Reports viewed: 9,301,407
Broker tour searches run: 12,876
Open house searches run: 8,364
Statistical searches run: 26,926

RMLS™ Subscribers
RMLS™ subscribers as of December 2014: 11,279
New RMLS™ subscribers (compared to December 2013): 603
Increase in subscribers, above: +5.7%
Subscribers who attended training: 3,047
Number of calls to the RMLS™ Help Desk: 22,978
Number of Help Desk chats: 3,012
Number of incidents reported using the “Report Issue” button: 5,299
CE hours distributed by RMLS™ at no cost to subscribers: 4,260
Total attendance at RMLS™ training events: 4,800

RMLS.com
Total customer visits to RMLS.com: 3,375,870
Unique visits: 1,082,046
Total listing views: 2,299,823

Social Media
RMLS™ followers on Facebook (December 31st): 2,930
RMLS™ followers on Twitter (December 31st): 2,358

Don’t forget about the other numbers we regularly compile! In addition to publishing Market Action each month, we have statistical summaries available on RMLSweb with information dating back several years. Since 2012 we’ve also been compiling statistics about residential distressed properties in RMLSweb.

We love numbers here at RMLS™, and hope you find this data as fun and interesting as we do.

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

RMLS™ began disaster recovery/business continuance (DR/BC) planning in earnest in 2002. The events of September 11, 2001, brought home the absolute necessity for this kind of planning, as it did for many businesses. Of course, part of running a responsible business has always been planning for emergencies and contingencies, but that process was formalized for RMLS™ starting in 2002.

Our first attempts at documenting the steps for disaster recovery were a little clumsy and hard to maintain. We are now on our third iteration of our DR/BC plan, and have refined it to identify the response needed for various types and levels of events—a snow day or an RMLSweb outage to the loss of our corporate facility due to earthquake or fire.

Everyone at RMLS™ has a role in helping to respond appropriately to situations that threaten the safety of employees and the continuity of the services we provide. Of course, the highest priority in any crisis is care for life and physical safety of anyone present, if that is an issue. After that, attention goes to reducing loss of data and assets. Since our service is critical to our subscribers, our goal is uninterrupted service, so a focus on speedy recovery and communication are key elements of our planning.

Part of that speedy recovery is having a redundant database and servers for RMLSweb. In 2008, we moved our DR/BC servers from a location in Portland to a building in Roseburg, built in partnership with the Douglas County Association of REALTORS®. Data is continually replicated to those servers, and during maintenance mode each month, RMLSweb actually operates from Roseburg while the main Portland servers receive their patches and updates.

Disaster recovery planning is not something that you can do once and forget about. It needs to be part of the business plan and a living, changing process

The next post will focus on listing data accuracy. If you have any questions you would like to have answered, I encourage you to post a comment.

Photo: iStockPhoto/Endurodog

RMLS™ released a round of site improvements and bug fixes to RMLSweb that went live this morning. RE Technology is now available for free to RMLS™ subscribers, detail view has been expanded again, and a comparable mapping component has been added to the CMA report! Those are just a few of the improvements you may notice around the site starting today.

RE Technology

RMLS™ is now offering subscribers access to RE Technology free of charge. RE Technology is an educational resource for real estate professionals that shows agents how to use technology to find more leads, close more deals, and boost the bottom line. The site contains useful tools in addition to connecting REALTORS® to the knowledge to leverage these tools adeptly.

New users of RE Technology will need to create an account to begin using the site. Once you have an account, logging in to RMLSweb will also enable access to RE Technology without signing on again.

Access RE Technology on RMLSweb by navigating to one of the two links menus: either on the left sidebar of the desktop page, or under Toolkit in the navigation menu.

Detail View Grows Again

Detail view on RMLSweb has been a hit with users, so RMLS™ continues to integrate the feature throughout the site. Starting today, subscribers will be able to access the detail view tab on search results for taxes, hotsheets, open houses, and broker tours.

Detail view presents a solution to some common problems subscribers encounter. Users can switch between reports without reloading an entire page, meaning a subscriber can browse listings more quickly without losing their place in a long list of search results.

Map of Comparables in CMA Report

Where are the comparable properties located in relation to the subject property? The CMA report now includes the option to include a map of comparables in the report.

Access this feature by navigating to the Report tab in CMA Profiles. Under “Options,” check the box that includes “Map of Comparables to Your Home,” then generate your report as usual.

Easy!

More Improvements…

Several other improvements and bug fixes were released along with the new features named above.
• Certain error messages on RMLSweb that used to appear in black text now appear in red, a visual popout that helps subscribers see what needs to be changed for a search to work.
• Subscribers using Chrome may have experienced issues clicking on the calendar button to select a date. This bug has been fixed.
• Did you know that it is impossible to search for bank-owned and short sale properties at the same time? It’s a common error, and RMLSweb now sports an error message clarifying the problem when it occurs.

And Even More Improvements!

Even more minor changes were made this week—housecleaning business that subscribers may never notice because we’re aiming to create a seamless user experience.

If you ever encounter something you think may have changed, consider looking at the deployment history of RMLSweb or contacting the RMLS™ Help Desk for assistance at (503) 872-8002 or (877) 256-2169.

UPDATE (February 4, 2015)
RMLS™ has discovered an issue with the new CMA mapping feature, so it has been taken offline temporarily. We are working hard to resolve the issue and restore the feature as quickly as possible.