The Challenge
Southern California Multiple Listing Services, including Orange, Riverside, San Bernadino and Los Angeles Counties and surrounding communities, maintain separate MLS symptoms governed by their respective MLS Rules and Regulations. Though these MLSs have enjoyed a history of sharing information, brokers and agents have struggled with complicated access protocols and data display differences. Multiple systems and display differences fall short of providing MLS members a workable way to access and post listings or a means to efficiently conduct their business... it is a square peg jammed into a round hole.

The Game Plan
In April 2006, California Real Estate Technology Services (CARETS) began the development of an enhanced way of sharing data that would better serve the real time needs of Southern California brokers and agents. A round peg. No longer would it be necessary to join necessary to join several MLSs, deal with multiple unconnected links or to master other dissimilar MLS software, everything would be available in their familiar home MLS. Simply put, we needed to provide our agents and brokers with the same boundaryless data access that consumers have enjoyed for years. Subscribers will only have to join one MLS to have access to all participating MLS databases, and brokers and agents will have one dataset and one data feed that will encompass all MLSs for their internal and IDX uses. The finished prduct will complete our goal of putting our subscribers in an advantaged position above the consumer in regards to access of information about real estate in Southern California.

The Future
Once the infrastructure, standardization and connectivity protocols were clearly defined and agreed upon by all participating MLSs, a Request for Proposal (RFP) went out for a bid to 18 organizations that have experience providing such database solutions. In September 2007 a vendor was selected out of a group of five finalists. A Rules committee has completed an initial set of uniform MLS Rules and Regulations with data and IDX violation policies being finalized as well. A technical team comprised of individuals from each participating MLS is currently mapping data to an initial unified dataset that incorporates the industry standard RETS 2.0 schema. The Governance subcommittee has completed its work pertaining to the corporate structure with final concepts currently under review by all participants. The IDX that will incorporate an aggregated database providing a data feed to brokers is targeted for completion in the first quarter of 2008. The final implementation of this groundbreaking effort of transitioning of all aggregated data to the participating MLSs, will be accomplished in the six months following. Once completed, the resulting services will provide brokers and agents with a powerful tool to better efficiently conduct their business, and hopefully will become a model for the rest of the real estate industry to follow.