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

As we celebrate 25 years of service to the real estate community in the northwest, it is interesting to look at some of the high-level numbers that describe the business and economics of the multiple listing service.

Let’s start with the number of subscribers. In March 1991, before service had even begun, there were over 3,400 Portland-area REALTORS® committed to participating in the new multiple listing service. This March, we had 12,472 subscribers from all over Oregon and southern Washington. The March with the most subscribers was 2007 with 14,178 active REALTORS®.

The chart below shows the rise and fall of subscriber numbers (as of March of each year) plotted against total numbers of closed residential sales for the year across the entire MLS. Sales peaked in 2005 with a total of 57,745, two years prior to the peak in subscriber numbers. The number of sales has been steadily rising since the recession low of 31,028 in 2008. The 55,979 sales in 2015 were the second highest number recorded in a year at RMLS™.

Due to a much higher overall average sales price, the total dollar volume of residential sales posted in RMLS™, 2015 achieved a new high water mark of $17,567,003,000 despite fewer total sales than 2005. The average sales price across all RMLS™ sales in 2005 was $268,300 compared to $313,800 in 2015.

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

UPDATE: May 5, 2016

By subscriber request, here are the same graphs broken down by state:

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

At their annual leadership retreat, 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 2015 are also in the works.

Watch List: This project will create a new feature on RMLSweb enabling subscribers to add individual listings to a “shopping cart” and receive push notifications when the status or a price change occurs. Potential scope includes ability to tag tax parcel records for notification when a listing is published.

Mobile Innovation Project: This project will utilize information available in a mobile device – photos, GPS, etc. – to create a property profile for use in creating CMAs, running reverse prospecting searches, and starting an in-progress listing in RMLSweb.

Frequency of Auto-Emails: This project will re-engineer auto-emails to reliably run the entire process within an hour. As part of this project, subscribers should be able to refine the frequency at which auto-emails are sent to individual clients.

Facebook Integration: This project will allow subscribers to easily post their own listings to Facebook, and will also fix formatting problems for mobile devices when RMLS.com listings are shared to Facebook.

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

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

Before we plunge headlong into the new year, let’s take one last look back at 2015.

It was a year of growth and change, energized by real estate market conditions. Closed sales recorded through November approached or exceeded 120% of closed sales in the previous year in almost every area served by RMLS™. This translates into a 20% increase in dollar volume of transactions. 2014 posted approximately $15 billion in sales, and 2015 will see over $18 billion in volume for all properties sold through RMLS™.

The improvement in real estate prospects has not gone unnoticed by job seekers. RMLS™ started the year with 10,676 subscribers and is projected to end 2015 with over 12,200 subscribers, an increase of 14%.

Some highlights of 2015 for RMLS™:

• Eight new RMLS™ classes were added to the list over the course of the year, including RPR Basics, SentriLock Essentials, Android Essentials, iOS Essentials, Utilizing RMLSweb Statistics, RMLS™ Rules and Regulations, RMLS™ Rules and Regulations Jeopardy, and Mobile Apps for REALTORS®. (To register for any of these classes, please contact training@rmls.com or call the Help Desk at 503-872-8002 or 877-256-2169 toll free.)

• RMLS™ was invited and became a Home Energy Info Accelerator Partner in May, when that US Department of Energy program was established.

• A listing forms change in July featured a new supplement for green/energy information.

• We became the fifth MLS in the nation to be certified with RESO (Real Estate Standards Organization) Data Dictionary version 1.3 in August. (We went on to surpass that level in December and were certified compliant at 1.4 Silver.)

• A new photo loader was introduced on RMLSweb in October which allows up to 32 images per listing and features high-resolution imagery and built-in basic editing tools.

• A new Beaverton training venue was inaugurated in November.

• A new mapping interface for RMLSweb was released in December.

• The Financial Tools on RMLSweb were modified to work with multiple browsers in February and the outdated default values within the tools were updated in December.

We want to take this opportunity to say a special thank all of our subscribers. We appreciate the opportunity to serve you and look forward to sharing our 25th anniversary celebration with you in 2016.

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

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.

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.

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.

The stellar RMLS™ Help Desk staff: Joanne Fulgaro, Ryan Jacobsen, and Serena Kendrick.

This post is part of MLS Insight, a series about how things work at RMLS™.

The RMLS™ Help Desk receives the highest scores of any department at RMLS™ on our annual Subscriber Satisfaction Survey. For the last three years running, they have garnered a 4 out of 5, or “Very Satisfied.” What makes the Help Desk tick?

To help answer that question I asked for the call log for a single day. That day turned out to be Monday, December 15, 2014. As it happened, Monday, December 15th turned out to be an average day at the call center. Eighty calls were received. In the twelve months ending in November, there were just about 23,000 calls. The Help Desk is on duty 5-1/2 days a week, so the average number of calls per day is roughly 80.4 calls.

Calls on Monday, December 15th came from subscribers in offices located in 21 different cities and towns in Oregon and Washington. Everett, Washington, was the northernmost and Joseph, Oregon, the most easterly. Port Orford was both the most southern and most western location of a call received that day. Incidentally, Port Orford has the distinction of being the westernmost incorporated place in the lower 48 states. The highest number of calls came predictably from Portland at 27, followed by Vancouver, Washington, and Lake Oswego, Oregon, at ten each.

Almost three fourths of the calls—58—came from subscribers. Fourteen participant brokers, four appraisers, and three personal assistants called. One call was received from a non-member in central Oregon, looking for information about joining RMLS™.

The Help Desk technicians were able to resolve all but one of the 80 calls that same day. One call concerning a browser problem was carried over for resolution the next day. In that case, a session for the technician to use a remote desktop was scheduled the following day to delve further into the problem.

More than eighty percent of those 80 calls received on December 15th were handled by the Help Desk technicians. Most of the other 15 callers were referred to internal RMLS™ resources, primarily the Accounting, Membership, and Data Accuracy staff. In only three cases were subscribers redirected to other entities. On this day those were AOL, RPR, and SentriLock.

Fifty-four of the calls were about some functionality in RMLSweb, including 20 calls about password issues and 16 about Listing Load. These two areas are consistently at the top of the call topics list. Other RMLSweb questions concerned searching of various kinds (4), report printing (3), inventory (2), and tax ID (2), leaving seven other unique RMLSweb questions. Other areas our answer folks provided help in were SentriLock (9), membership (6), Data Accuracy (4), and training classes (2). There were five calls about other topics such as transaction forms, RPR and IDX.

It was a full day of questions and answers at the Help Desk on Monday, December 15th, just like it is on most days. Thank you, Help Desk!

Next time we will talk about disaster recovery/business continuance planning at RMLS™. If you have any questions you would like to have answered, I encourage you to post a comment to this blog post.

The RMLS™ accounting team—Dalece Lauck, Cheronn Foster, Ceri Howell, and Stacy Waples—are the friendly voices on the phone if you call regarding your RMLS™ bill.

This post is part of MLS Insight, a series about how things work at RMLS™.

Do you know there is an opportunity for receiving a discount on RMLS™ dues? This year, our annual Subscriber Satisfaction Survey revealed that only around 20% of those responding knew about it.

Generally, subscriber dues are quarterly, billed in advance. However, there are now two options to make discounted payments for a longer time period. If you pay all subscriber dues annually in advance, you will receive a 10% discount, and there is now also a brand new offering of half-yearly advance payment with a 4% discount. With the end of 2014 rapidly approaching, so is the opportunity for making an annual payment to take advantage of this discount opportunity for the full year in 2015. Call RMLS™ Accounting at 503-872-8003 for more information.

The Accounting Department works hard to make the billing process as easy and streamlined for subscribers as possible, while maintaining the highest level of fiscal responsibility for RMLS™. Last year, our billing process did not allow for payment of fees without penalty in the quarter of service, because this allowed us to virtually eliminate bad debt. No one received service that they had not paid for. However, this policy caused problems for some subscribers who needed to pay in the month or year that the service was actually received to make their accounting work the way they wanted it to. This year our billing timeline allows for payment without a late fee until the sixth of the month after billing occurs, eliminating those problems and not significantly increasing our exposure to unpaid service.

RMLS^™ will upgrade its billing and membership system in 2015. The RMLS™ Board of Directors approved a new contract with Abila, Inc, to use their cloud-based system netFORUM Enterprise. RMLS™ has used the same membership system since 1993. A change was needed because that system does not operate optimally over a wide area network—in plain English, this means that our branch offices often experience slow response and other difficulties. It has been increasingly difficult to maintain PCI compliance for credit card processing with the current system. After reviewing many products, Abila was chosen for its solid platform, customization potential, and commitment to PCI compliance and data security. The system will also replace our outmoded HelpDesk software, as well as some other staff tools. Customization of the system and data migration will take place over the next six months or so. We do not expect to bill subscribers with the new system before the third quarter of 2015. When the system is rolled out, it will include an upgrade to the online payment system for subscribers.

Next month we will spotlight another department at RMLS™. If you have any questions you would like to have answered about how things work at RMLS™, I encourage you to post a comment to this blog.

This post is part of MLS Insight, a series about how things work at RMLS™.

RMLS™ is renewing its agreement with Oregon Real Estate Forms to pay for MLS-Connect® for zipForms on behalf of the RMLS™ subscribers who use the OREF Forms. The Board of Directors approved payment of this annual fee of $3.00/OREF Forms subscriber at its meeting in October. MLS-Connect® allows for auto-population from the listing data. We recently audited the available fields, and are sending all the data that is compatible to OREF for use in this functionality.

RMLS™ and OREF are two separate entities with a history of cooperation in serving Oregon REALTORS®. From 2004 through 2010, RMLS™ provided the on-line forms software solution for OREF. The program was based on Microsoft technology, and after six years of operation, some key components were no longer available to support the software that RMLS™ had built for OREF. The REALTOR®-owned zipLogix platform was chosen by the OREF Board of Managers and was launched January 1, 2011. RMLS™ has participated in the MLS-Connect® feature from the beginning to add value for our subscribers.

Thanks to everyone who commented on the last post – Thinking About an MLS Without Area Numbers! As I stated, this is not in the works at this time, but discussion about how things might work in the future is healthy. Technology moves at a great rate, and we don’t always know where it is headed. Even just thinking about doing things in a different way keeps us mentally agile and a little more ready for whatever changes comes our way. Thanks again for participating.

I took a detour this month to tell you about OREF. Next month we will get back to talking about the various departments at RMLS™ and their plans for the upcoming year. If you have any questions you would like to have answered about how things work at RMLS™, I encourage you to post a comment to this blog.

This post is part of MLS Insight, a series about how things work at RMLS™.

An MLS without area numbers: this idea might strike terror in your heart….or you might say to yourself, “it’s about time!” In any case, it is not a proposal that is currently on the table, but with the changes in technology and the way people think about location, it is probably not too early to start the conversation.

When RMLS™ opened its doors in 1991, it was to the REALTORS® in the Portland metropolitan area in Oregon. At that time, the major advertising vehicle for homes for sale was the newspaper—The Oregonian, in our case. RMLS™ based its MLS area numbers on the map and classified ad numbers of The Oregonian. The 12 core areas for Multnomah, Clackamas, and Washington counties have remained basically unchanged for 23 years.

When regions were added, local preferences regarding area numbers were retained. Clark County, for example, is divided into more than 30 areas, while Coos County is contained in one area.

The end result is more than 200 area numbers in RMLSweb, without a common reason why each geographical area is an “Area Number.” In some cases, a single area comprises several large but dissimilar communities. In others, areas may have so few listings and sales as a sample size that few, if any, conclusions could be drawn from looking at their data. In fact, there are rural areas that had no new listings and no closed sales in all of 2013.

In the world of today, The Oregonian posts its real estate ads online and there is no search option for area numbers. GPS location services have replaced maps to a large degree. It is a very different world than the world of 1991, when there was a Thomas Brothers map in the car of virtually every REALTOR®.

Here are some things to think about:

What role do area numbers play in the life of an RMLS™ subscriber today?

Has map search replaced searching by area number? Could it?

What could replace area numbers for searching besides map search—counties? zip codes? There should be something to narrow the initial search that pertains to location.

What about Market Action and other statistical reports? (Some counties are already reported in terms of zip codes in Market Action.)

If and when we ever do move away from area numbers, we need to have a good plan to meet the needs of our subscribers. Ideas?

Thanks for voyaging into the future with me. Next month we will talk with the various departments at RMLS™ and their plans for the upcoming year. If you have any questions you would like to have answered about how things work at RMLS™, I encourage you to post a comment to this blog.

UPDATE (November 20, 2014): RMLS™ is not the only MLS engaging in this interesting discussion. Here’s an article from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer about NWMLS area numbers.