The RMLS™ Rules Committee has finalized revisions to the Office Exclusive/Authorization to Exclude Addendum. These changes—which will impact the form itself and the RMLS™ Rules and Regulations—were approved by the RMLS™ Board of Directors and will start rolling out next week.

Most notably, the form will have a new title: Authorization to Exclude from MLS Addendum. Clients listing a property who wish to exclude their property from RMLS™ will now need to initial their understanding of specific components.  These components remind sellers about the value of listing their property on a multiple listing service.

The RMLS™ Rules and Regulations will see some slight adjustments due to this rollout, mostly related to the form’s title change.

View associated documents below:

• Authorization to Exclude from MLS Addendum
• Authorization to Exclude from MLS Addendum E-Form
• Authorization to Exclude from MLS Addendum REDLINE
• Rules and Regulations REDLINE
• Rules and Regulations
• Washington Listing Contract REDLINE
• Oregon Listing Contract REDLINE

Subscribers are advised to switch to using the new forms immediately. It will take some time for the changes to be reflected outside the RMLS™ system (for example, OREF zipForms), but RMLS™ is working hard to get changes reflected across all platforms as quickly as possible.

Questions about the revised Authorization to Exclude from MLS Addendum? Contact RMLS™ Data Accuracy at (503) 236-7657.

RMLS™ subscribers who use OREF forms, great news—a new feature has been released on RMLSweb that helps make transactions easier. Technicians have rolled out mlsPush/SSO by zipLogix, enabling users to move seamlessly from RMLSweb into zipForm®.

While viewing an Agent Full report, clicking the OREF button will begin a new transaction within zipForm® and auto-populate some listing information into the cover sheet. Users wishing to manage all OREF transactions on their account should click the OREF/zipLogix link under the Toolkit menu or in the list of links on the RMLSweb desktop.

RMLSweb users will need to log in to zipForm® the first time they use this service, but future access will utilize single sign-on technology, meaning less hassle.

Those who prefer to keep using zipLogic’s mlsConnect for forms will be able to do so.

Read more about this project or access tutorials on the OREF website.

Oregon Real Estate Forms (OREF) LLC invites real estate professionals to join their final CE opportunity of the year, a webinar that offers 2.5 CE credits for registered attendees.

9:30am-11:00am
Maximizing the Use of Your Oregon Real Estate Forms Library will cover which forms to use with different sale agreements (Instructors: Phil Querin and Jeff Wiren)

11:00am-12:00pm
ZipForm Plus® with Transaction Management and Storage (TMS) will cover new features within ZipForm® Plus. (Instructor: Christina Miller with zipLogix)

Participation in all 2.5 hours of this webinar is required, no partial credits will be administered.

Read more and register for Maximizing the Use of Your Forms Per Any Sale Agreement and ZipForm® Plus with TMS.

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.

Amaze your REALTOR® friends and astound your clients with the answers to conundrums regarding professional inspections, material defects, borders and boundaries, and rejecting an inspection report! Leading this webinar will be Phil Querin, legal counsel to the OREF Forms Committee; and Jeff Wiren, OREF Forms Committee Vice-Chairman. Two hours of continuing education credit will be available.

Read more about this webinar and register on the OREF website.

Update (May 28, 2014): RMLS™ recently prepared a FAQ document about the office exclusive changes.

As announced earlier this spring, RMLS™ is bringing changes to our office exclusive form and policies. These changes now have final approval by the RMLS™ Board of Directors and will take effect May 5, 2014.

After carefully considering additional input from subscribers, RMLS™ changed the original revisions in the following ways:
• Removed the requirement to submit a copy of the listing contract when submitting a signed office exclusive form.
• The RMLS™ Rules and Regulations have been revised to reflect that new construction is handled differently.

Retained is the language that prohibits beginning any marketing before “date marketing to begin.” This topic generated much of  the discussion among subscribers, but RMLS™ President Kurt von Wasmuth recently explained some important details in how the rule will be administered:

The basic point of the changes to this (Section 3.2) is to prohibit marketing of a listed property unless the listing broker either submits the listing to RMLS™ or submits an office exclusive form for that listing within the time limits specified. The rule describes marketing activity as including—among other things—placing a sign on the property, social media or internet exposure, or direct marketing of the property to brokers or consumers. This rule does not prevent a listing broker from engaging in general, non-specific discussions about a property that will soon come on the market. Examples of these general discussions would be a broker’s announcement about property in a neighborhood “coming soon” during a company sales meeting, with X bedrooms, Y baths, and a certain kind of yard in a certain price range.

Falling under the rule would be specific marketing efforts regarding a particular property, such as identifying an address, a listing price, and the like. These constitute direct marketing, and in that case the listing either needs to be entered into RMLS™ within 72 hours of signing or the signed office exclusive form needs to be sent to RMLS™. This approach was designed to allow reasonable “pre-marketing” activities that the brokerage community generally regards as common, fair, and helpful to sellers, while preserving the basic premise of any MLS that all participants share their listings on a timely basis, unless a seller has made an informed choice to withhold a property from the MLS.

View a redlined version of the RMLS™ rules impacted by these finalized changes.
View the new Office Exclusive/Authorization to Exclude Addendum.
View redlined versions of the Oregon and Washington listing contracts.

Learn more about these two new Supplement forms!