When I mention simplifying and lowering costs for a real estate brokerage’s experience with their roster, listings and leads, stay with me! Data standards, open APIs, connectivity — these are the foundational elements that will build a simplified, fluid ecosystem that lets multiple listing services, brokerages, all types of technology vendors and service providers easily speak the same language: the story of the Tower of Babel in reverse. I’ve spoken with many brokerage executives recently, and their frustrations with how limited they are with their data is a constant refrain.
Brokerage Babel: An Illustration
Imagine the following: An agent, speaking French, enters listing data into a MLS system. As long as all the MLS users speak French, everything runs smoothly. Until, one day, a brokerage’s tech vendor says they need the brokerage’s listings from the MLS, but the vendor speaks only German. So the vendor has to build a translator so the French listings can be useful to them in German. Now that same brokerage needs the listing data sent to a print partner, but the printer only speaks Japanese and another translation tool needs to be built. And like the children’s game of “telephone,” the data coming out of the printer may not be exactly what the French agent put in.
Now take this scenario, multiply it by several different MLS vendors, and tech vendors, and other vendors, and it’s the Tower of Babel all over again. And the industry pays a high cost for getting the data from the MLS to the vendor to the printer, because they all speak different languages.
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Now imagine if all the MLSs decided to speak the SAME language. Technology vendors, if they’re smart, will say, “I’m going to learn THAT language, because I can get data from these MLSs without learning French or any multitude of languages. One language connects me to all MLS systems.” This very concept is the objective of the Real Estate Standards Organization, or RESO. As a participating vendor of RESO, we can import any MLS’s data with little to no effort if they are on RESO’s Data Dictionary Standard. If they are not, we must engage in RETS mapping, which is us “learning another language” when mapping an MLS to our system. This is time-consuming and more expensive for a brokerage to do.
Beyond MLS: TRIBUS Source
That’s the story for MLS systems, but there’s more to a brokerage’s data than just listings. There’s agent rosters, consumer leads and transactions. And think of how challenging it is for a brokerage to do any of the following:
- Get new leads into or out of your CRM (you do have a brokerage CRM, right?)
- Enhancing your own IDX listings with better/more photographs, branded tours or more text
- Have new listings automatically sent to your printer or digital marketing agency
- Customize how market data appears on your website
- Sync your roster with printers for new business cards or to integrate into property marketing
- Create customizable reports
- Let agents easily push their lead data to services they use
What makes these and other tasks easy is a data standard and some technology called an application programming interface (API), which lets organizations share and update their leads/listings/transactions/roster with other organizations in an easy, standard way. While TRIBUS has had a data standard and an API for years, we’re calling it TRIBUS Source to make it easier to understand.
TRIBUS Source is, in essence, a warehouse for a brokerage’s data. TRIBUS maintains that data, and makes it available to your custom real estate brokerage website, CRM, brokerage Intranet, digital marketing, franchisor system (like Realogy’s DASH system, for example), third-party vendors, and more. We currently connect with over 150 different solutions, and that list of integrations is growing constantly.
Conclusion
If your costs of data management are high, or your ability to get data where you need it when you need it, consider a platform that speaks the new language of real estate technology, beyond brokerage Babel. Talk to TRIBUS.
