As Chris posted last week, one of the big topics at this months RESO meeting was the upcoming June 2009 deadline for RETS certification. For those that are still unaware, in the 2007 Annual Meeting in Las Vegas, the Multiple Listing Policy committee created a new policy that all member owned MLSs needed to be RETS compliant by June 2009. Here is the full text of the policy:
“The integrity of data is a foundation to the orderly Real Estate market. The Real Estate Transaction Standards (RETS) provides a vendor-neutral, secure approach to exchanging listing information between the broker and the MLS. In order to ensure that the goal of maintaining an orderly marketplace is maintained, and to further establish REALTOR® information as the trusted data source, MLS organizations owned and operated by associations of REALTOR® will comply with the RETS standards by June 2009, and keep current with the standard’s new versions by implementing new releases of RETS within one year
from ratification.”
This new policy will help drive adoption of the RETS standard, and make it easier for brokers and the MLS to share data between themselves and third parties.
To support the process of certifying MLSs as RETS complaint, CRT has been working with Hitachi to build to the compliance tester that will drive this certification process, and it is scheduled to be publicly available in the third week of January. We are entering a beta testing period on December 17th, if you would like to be a beta tester, please email me at atillman@crt.realtors.org
Update: MLS RETS compliance requirement has been moved to December 2009 per the MLS Board Policy decision at this year’s NAR Midyear Meeting
What happens if boards are not in compliance with the RETS requirement?