It's Alive! Control Your Data and Your Future with Upstream

We are excited to announce that today we launched Upstream's platform in RMLS (Portland) as Direct Input, and ARMLS (Phoenix) and NTREIS (Dallas) as Broker Direct Feed with CRMLS (California Regional). West Penn (Pennsylvania), Realcomp (southeastern Michigan), ABOR (Austin), Northstar (Minnesota), and Ann Arbor (Michigan) are soon to follow. We plan to continue our expansion, launching in five to six new markets per month.

We will now begin to onboard brokerages and their vendors in production markets. Here's how it works:

• Brokerages in "live" markets sign three agreements
• Upstream Participation Agreement (found here). This is our standard licensing agreement with payment terms, etc. We won't bill until Q4 even if you start today! If you're a large multi-MLS firm, and we haven't deployed in all your locations, we'll only bill for the number of agents using the platform.
• MLS Data Agreement (goes by many names). This is the agreement between your brokerage and your MLS to receive a feed of your listings to manage in Upstream.
• Our Vendor Contact Authorization. This document informs your vendors you plan to leverage Upstream and allows us to work directly with them on your behalf to facilitate integration.
• Upstream inventories your vendors and integrates. This only needs to be performed once so if they've already integrated, you're set! If not, we'll help them integrate.
• We schedule a time to train your team.
• When your vendors are ready, and your team is ready, we'll ensure your rosters are set, distribution is configured, and you decide your "cutover date."

Prioritizing future markets will be based on participating brokerage locations, MLS participation, and the size of individual MLS markets. Upstream has a goal of providing service to over 250,000 agents by the end of 2018.

We've found an increasing number of brokerages are realizing that their data is in the center of our industry's future. They want to better control and be more responsible with data assets, especially where they have a fiduciary duty to protect their clients. Brokerages representing almost 100,000 agents have signed our Participation Agreement, including Baird and Warner, Howard Hanna, Long and Foster, Crye-Leike, Coldwell Banker Bain, BHGRE Rand Realty, and Latter & Blum, to name a few.

"You don't have to look very far into any news feed to find a story of data breaches, unauthorized or misuse of data or entities gaining disproportionate gains on the sale of data," said Dan Elsea, President of Brokerage Services for Real Estate One Family of Companies and Upstream's Chairman. "Our industry, of course, is based on data, so it is imperative that each broker and real estate practitioner be able to manage and control their data. Upstream provides that opportunity for our industry, and it is wonderful to have our rollout underway. We want to thank the MLSs and brokers who have worked so hard with all the Upstream partners to put together what is really an unprecedented industry program. Look for Upstream to be coming to your market shortly as we roll out across the country."

If you look at the top menu of this site, you'll notice "Login." This is your access point. If you're interested in leveraging Upstream, sign up here.

We look forward to working with you soon.

​Here are a few BDF screenshots that were taken from our staging environment with sample data. No listing was harmed while collecting these captures!

Dashboard - All your listings!

Listing source and distribution status

Rearrange and add more photos

Manage where you distribute your listings

Configure your distribution options by vendor

Distribution defaults - overview

To view the original article, visit the Upstream blog.