Making Sense of RETS: Part 2

So, now, you've got data somewhere online in an exported format from the MLS. Great! That just saved a large amount of time, but we aren't done yet.

The good:

• You can actually see information about properties!
  
• The MLS didn't have to do much to make that happen because they probably allow many people to have access to that information so you probably aren't charged anything (or at least, not as much) to make that happen. Saved money!
  
• They automatically update the data every day (usually) so you can expect updated property data that often. Sure beats copy/pasting information every day.
  

The bad:

• You've got a lot of information but it's hard to read. You need to figure out how to break the file apart so you can know what each piece of data means. Not too bad.
  
• You've got a file in a semi-programmable format but you don't know what fields are where and what each piece of information is. In most cases, the information for actually understanding the file is available in PDF format from your MLS. Having this documentation is extremely helpful but isn't updated often and it's in a format that you can't have a program understand so you end up reading it and interpreting it manually. Yuck.
  
• Data that's updated daily is decent in most cases, but what if you want something a little more often? You could download the file every 60 seconds if you wanted but unless it's updated, it doesn't do anything for you. You'd need the MLS's cooperation for that. Probably not going to happen.
  
• When the MLS makes changes to the data (i.e. they add a new field to the feed), there's very little you can do to know about this. If they don't tell you ahead of time, you've just been blindsided. You're expecting 150 pieces of information and you get 151 so things start to break down. You can't see what changed because, chances are, you don't get a new PDF every evening and if you request it from them again, it's probably not updated.
  

(Note that everything above is just talking about getting and processing the data portion of the feed. Getting and processing photos for those properties is normally a totally different process with it's own challenges. For the sake of keeping this simple, we'll ignore this aspect of it for now.)

If you're shopping around the Internet for an IDX vendor for your IDX-enabled website so you can show site users properties from your local MLS, the above process is the challenge. If you're the IDX vendor, you're all too familiar with this process because you probably manage dozens of data feeds and experience these kinds of problems almost on a daily basis. My heart goes out to you.

So, what can we do to make this even better? This is typically where you stop if you've never heard of RETS, but we're not stopping because you're about to.

(continued in Part 3)