Real Estate IDX Compliance

…can automation work at scale?

In the real estate industry there is a huge concern around compliance. Almost every aspect of the technology in this industry eventually comes back to this conversation at some point. Is the data being attributed correctly? Are the correct registration numbers prominently displayed at first contact? How do you determine that VOW access is permitted? What about copyright and rights to distribute?

We’ve seen this conversation happen more times then you can imagine and it lead us to think about the problem from our own perspective. If you can create a unified dataset of listing data with a standardized toolkit that allows any developer to integrate MLS data into their site, why can you not provide those developers a framework for which to integrate with MLS data in a way that easily handles compliance for each and every market at little to no overhead to them?

If each market has a set of rules for how to display information, could these rules not be implemented as a facet of the toolkit which the developer is using? This seems like it would alleviate the concern for the developer since their focus is creating a great product not integrating 600 different kind of copyrights notices. It also seems as if this could solve the problem for the stakeholders of that market as they would be able to change their rules and simply “push” an update out to all of the sites which implement this framework.

The compliance conversation is very different from the conversation about unification of data because there is no equivalent to RETS (that this author knows of) that provides the basis for display compliance between markets. If there was a framework for compliance, what do you think it would look like? What rules are the most important rules to protecting the rights of the Agents, Brokers and MLSs? Do you think it would be realistic to come up with a unified standard for these rules at the national level or is this better handled market by market?

We’re very interested to hear your thoughts on this as compliance is something we take very seriously and in order for us to provide a framework to push innovation forward in the real estate industry we are inevitably going to have to entertain this conversation and help to implement solutions that unify the process in the same way our data normalization framework does this for MLS data.

The Retsly Team