Sam DeBord Becomes RESO CEO

The evolution of data management standards has been driven by generous contributions of the best minds in real estate technology, shepherded by Jeremy Crawford over the past two years. Today, we welcome another great leader to RESO, Sam DeBord. His credentials are outstanding.

The RESO announcement is important because MLS systems in America are the platform for data management in real estate. Since its inception, MLSs found their own path to creating data schemas, like data payloads, data fields, and data business rules.

As brokers and agents have evolved their application diversity in their business from property search to a wide array of applications, the unique data schema of each MLS required custom data mapping to insert MLS data into software products.

Moreover, firms and vendors operating across multiple MLS markets face increased complexity mapping software to MLS data that is often formatted differently from market to market. To make MLS data more consistent, the industry founded the non-profit organization called the Real Estate Standards Organization, or RESO.

RESO's charter is to work across all MLSs in America to normalize data management by the creation and adoption of common practices. This standardization allows software to connect to MLS data with minimal data mapping, saving time and money.

The iterative adoption of a common set of data management practices creates RESO standards. Each year, members of the RESO, which include MLSs, MLS vendors, brokerage firms, and technology companies, meet in Workgroups to evolve new standard together. They collaborate to guide the direction on a few key areas that impact and shape how data flows from MLS systems into the software used by the real estate industry.

Over the past few years, RESO has released new standards that have dramatically reshaped MLS data. Namely, our industry has stopped evolving an old standard that was custom designed for real estate (called RETS) and prioritized a new standard based on a non-industry specific schema called OData – or open data protocol.

A key trigger to the adoption of RESO standards is the mandate by the National Association of REALTORS® that all Realtor® affiliated MLSs must adopt the RESO standards within one year of their release. This includes two main features. The first is the RESO Data Dictionary, which sets the standards for data fields (names and structure). A simplified example—bedrooms (name) and a numeric value (structure).

The second main feature is a standard for how data is transported, and the new standard that replaces RETS is the RESO Web API, which is closely aligned with OData RESTful API. Because an enormous population of software developers like Microsoft or Twitter and thousands of others use OData, it's easier to use and adopt.

As you can see, RESO, with the help of the entire industry, still has a lot of work to do and that's why we welcome Sam to his new role with RESO. Here is the news release announcing Sam as their new CEO.

To view the original article, visit the WAV Group blog.