Making Sense of RETS: Part 1

For a moment, forget about protocols, character lengths, abstraction layers, integer fields, HTTP headers and all of that, and let's look at the problem starting from the very beginning:

If you're an agent or broker (or a developer for one), the MLS has data and you want it.

They could print off each property sheet and mail it to you but that's too slow and inefficient and doesn't allow you to really do anything with that information once you have it.

They could call you over the phone and read off everything to someone that would re-type it all in a format that you can use, but that takes even longer and requires phone time with people that would probably takes weeks to get that information, and by the time you're done, it's out of date.

They could copy/paste the property sheets into emails and email them to you. Even though this is a little faster, that still turns into a TON of emails and you'd have to copy/paste that information into something that makes sense to you.

You could copy/paste the property sheets using your own MLS access software but that's really sloppy, takes a ton of time and still doesn't get you the information you want so you can use it without a lot more work.

Let's get a little more technical.....

They could create an exported version of the MLS data and make it available somewhere online. You'd somehow grab that data, figure out what it all meant (what format it was in, how things were separated, etc.) and then turn it into something you could use. This is a much better solution compared to the ones above but still has a few drawbacks. We're getting close, though.

(continued in Part 2)