![MLS Insight: RMLS™ Distribution Services]()
by Gail Hare | Apr 30, 2015 | RMLSweb
Distribution Services Staff Kim Hutchinson and Jeff Mitchell.
MLS Insight is a series about how things work at RMLS™.
Distribution Services at RMLS™ facilitates and manages the electronic transfer of RMLS™ listings outside of RMLSweb. RMLS™ listings appear on the internet and are utilized in applications that support REALTORS®—all in accordance with agreements between RMLS™, our real estate firm participants, and third party vendors. Currently we have almost 6,000 active data access agreements.
When RMLS™ began serving REALTORS® in 1991, there were no property listings on the internet. In fact, as natural and universal as the internet now seems, the World Wide Web was only invented in 1989 and it was not until 1993 that commercial providers were allowed to sell internet connections to individuals. That is when the explosion began in earnest and web traffic over the internet increased by 300,000%.
At RMLS™, an internet presence was approved by the Board of Directors in November 1995, and the first appearance of RMLS™ listings occurred in late April 1996. The internet created radical change in the way business was conducted in many industries, and 1998 was a year of intense discussion and debate in the real estate community about how the internet could and should be integrated into the multiple listing service. That November, the consensus from those discussions became the first RMLS™ Internet Policy. It put the brokerage in the driver’s seat. The basic premise of that first policy—that no listings would be posted on internet without the consent of the participating firm—remains the guiding principle for data distribution today.
Today, RMLS™ listing data is utilized in a variety of ways by our participants. Many offices and individual brokers have their own websites, where they display the listing data according to the IDX (Internet Data Exchange) and/or VOW (Virtual Office Website) policies. These policies are hammered out by National Association of REALTORS®. Firms may also instruct us to send only their own listings to various internet portals or syndication aggregators. This is how listings are funneled to sites like Zillow, Homes.com, OregonLive, etc. Firms can also request data sets to drive products that are used internally, with no consumer display. These can include statistical analysis, AVM creation, CRM programs, transaction management platforms, etc. Because Distribution Services is not part of the core MLS service, data access fees are charged that offset the expense of the program. The service providers, not the subscribers, pay these access fees.
Jeff Mitchell, Distribution Services Technician, manages all the agreements and administers the flow of data. Jeff says that when our subscribers ask about the format of the IDX data, he explains “RMLS™ makes IDX data available in a raw data format, so you will need an IDX Service Provider to process and populate this data on your website.” Forms and Documents on RMLSweb has a list of IDX service providers that are already established with RMLS™. Each of these service providers offer different services, as well as different monthly fees. We are also happy to work with new providers, but it takes some time for them to ramp up.
Kim Hutchinson, Data Quality Technician, works with the RETS computer that dishes up the data. Kim, along with other staff at RMLS™, work closely with RESO, the Real Estate Standards Organization, whose mission is the standardization of both the process and real estate data that is distributed. This benefits our subscribers by increasing the variety of tools and applications available to them.
The Distribution Services department is committed facilitating the flow of our participants’ listings outward in accordance with their direction and with timeliness, quality, and efficiency. You can contact Distribution Services via email or by phone at 503-872-8053.
The next post will focus on the RMLS™ Forms Committee. If you have questions on any RMLS™-related topic that you would like to have answered, I encourage you to post a comment.
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by Gail Hare | Jan 30, 2015 | RMLSweb
MLS Insight is a series about how things work at RMLS™.
RMLS™ began disaster recovery/business continuance (DR/BC) planning in earnest in 2002. The events of September 11, 2001, brought home the absolute necessity for this kind of planning, as it did for many businesses. Of course, part of running a responsible business has always been planning for emergencies and contingencies, but that process was formalized for RMLS™ starting in 2002.
Our first attempts at documenting the steps for disaster recovery were a little clumsy and hard to maintain. We are now on our third iteration of our DR/BC plan, and have refined it to identify the response needed for various types and levels of events—a snow day or an RMLSweb outage to the loss of our corporate facility due to earthquake or fire.
Everyone at RMLS™ has a role in helping to respond appropriately to situations that threaten the safety of employees and the continuity of the services we provide. Of course, the highest priority in any crisis is care for life and physical safety of anyone present, if that is an issue. After that, attention goes to reducing loss of data and assets. Since our service is critical to our subscribers, our goal is uninterrupted service, so a focus on speedy recovery and communication are key elements of our planning.
Part of that speedy recovery is having a redundant database and servers for RMLSweb. In 2008, we moved our DR/BC servers from a location in Portland to a building in Roseburg, built in partnership with the Douglas County Association of REALTORS®. Data is continually replicated to those servers, and during maintenance mode each month, RMLSweb actually operates from Roseburg while the main Portland servers receive their patches and updates.
Disaster recovery planning is not something that you can do once and forget about. It needs to be part of the business plan and a living, changing process
The next post will focus on listing data accuracy. If you have any questions you would like to have answered, I encourage you to post a comment.
Photo: iStockPhoto/Endurodog
![MLS Insight: RMLS™ Distribution Services]()
by Gail Hare | Jan 30, 2015 | RMLSweb
MLS Insight is a series about how things work at RMLS™.
RMLS™ began disaster recovery/business continuance (DR/BC) planning in earnest in 2002. The events of September 11, 2001, brought home the absolute necessity for this kind of planning, as it did for many businesses. Of course, part of running a responsible business has always been planning for emergencies and contingencies, but that process was formalized for RMLS™ starting in 2002.
Our first attempts at documenting the steps for disaster recovery were a little clumsy and hard to maintain. We are now on our third iteration of our DR/BC plan, and have refined it to identify the response needed for various types and levels of events—a snow day or an RMLSweb outage to the loss of our corporate facility due to earthquake or fire.
Everyone at RMLS™ has a role in helping to respond appropriately to situations that threaten the safety of employees and the continuity of the services we provide. Of course, the highest priority in any crisis is care for life and physical safety of anyone present, if that is an issue. After that, attention goes to reducing loss of data and assets. Since our service is critical to our subscribers, our goal is uninterrupted service, so a focus on speedy recovery and communication are key elements of our planning.
Part of that speedy recovery is having a redundant database and servers for RMLSweb. In 2008, we moved our DR/BC servers from a location in Portland to a building in Roseburg, built in partnership with the Douglas County Association of REALTORS®. Data is continually replicated to those servers, and during maintenance mode each month, RMLSweb actually operates from Roseburg while the main Portland servers receive their patches and updates.
Disaster recovery planning is not something that you can do once and forget about. It needs to be part of the business plan and a living, changing process
The next post will focus on listing data accuracy. If you have any questions you would like to have answered, I encourage you to post a comment.
Photo: iStockPhoto/Endurodog
![MLS Insight: RMLS™ Distribution Services]()
by Gail Hare | Dec 30, 2014 | RMLS News
The stellar RMLS™ Help Desk staff: Joanne Fulgaro, Ryan Jacobsen, and Serena Kendrick.
This post is part of MLS Insight, a series about how things work at RMLS™.
The RMLS™ Help Desk receives the highest scores of any department at RMLS™ on our annual Subscriber Satisfaction Survey. For the last three years running, they have garnered a 4 out of 5, or “Very Satisfied.” What makes the Help Desk tick?
To help answer that question I asked for the call log for a single day. That day turned out to be Monday, December 15, 2014. As it happened, Monday, December 15th turned out to be an average day at the call center. Eighty calls were received. In the twelve months ending in November, there were just about 23,000 calls. The Help Desk is on duty 5-1/2 days a week, so the average number of calls per day is roughly 80.4 calls.
Calls on Monday, December 15th came from subscribers in offices located in 21 different cities and towns in Oregon and Washington. Everett, Washington, was the northernmost and Joseph, Oregon, the most easterly. Port Orford was both the most southern and most western location of a call received that day. Incidentally, Port Orford has the distinction of being the westernmost incorporated place in the lower 48 states. The highest number of calls came predictably from Portland at 27, followed by Vancouver, Washington, and Lake Oswego, Oregon, at ten each.
Almost three fourths of the calls—58—came from subscribers. Fourteen participant brokers, four appraisers, and three personal assistants called. One call was received from a non-member in central Oregon, looking for information about joining RMLS™.
The Help Desk technicians were able to resolve all but one of the 80 calls that same day. One call concerning a browser problem was carried over for resolution the next day. In that case, a session for the technician to use a remote desktop was scheduled the following day to delve further into the problem.
More than eighty percent of those 80 calls received on December 15th were handled by the Help Desk technicians. Most of the other 15 callers were referred to internal RMLS™ resources, primarily the Accounting, Membership, and Data Accuracy staff. In only three cases were subscribers redirected to other entities. On this day those were AOL, RPR, and SentriLock.
Fifty-four of the calls were about some functionality in RMLSweb, including 20 calls about password issues and 16 about Listing Load. These two areas are consistently at the top of the call topics list. Other RMLSweb questions concerned searching of various kinds (4), report printing (3), inventory (2), and tax ID (2), leaving seven other unique RMLSweb questions. Other areas our answer folks provided help in were SentriLock (9), membership (6), Data Accuracy (4), and training classes (2). There were five calls about other topics such as transaction forms, RPR and IDX.
It was a full day of questions and answers at the Help Desk on Monday, December 15th, just like it is on most days. Thank you, Help Desk!
Next time we will talk about disaster recovery/business continuance planning at RMLS™. If you have any questions you would like to have answered, I encourage you to post a comment to this blog post.
![MLS Insight: RMLS™ Distribution Services]()
by Gail Hare | Dec 30, 2014 | RMLS News
The stellar RMLS™ Help Desk staff: Joanne Fulgaro, Ryan Jacobsen, and Serena Kendrick.
This post is part of MLS Insight, a series about how things work at RMLS™.
The RMLS™ Help Desk receives the highest scores of any department at RMLS™ on our annual Subscriber Satisfaction Survey. For the last three years running, they have garnered a 4 out of 5, or “Very Satisfied.” What makes the Help Desk tick?
To help answer that question I asked for the call log for a single day. That day turned out to be Monday, December 15, 2014. As it happened, Monday, December 15th turned out to be an average day at the call center. Eighty calls were received. In the twelve months ending in November, there were just about 23,000 calls. The Help Desk is on duty 5-1/2 days a week, so the average number of calls per day is roughly 80.4 calls.
Calls on Monday, December 15th came from subscribers in offices located in 21 different cities and towns in Oregon and Washington. Everett, Washington, was the northernmost and Joseph, Oregon, the most easterly. Port Orford was both the most southern and most western location of a call received that day. Incidentally, Port Orford has the distinction of being the westernmost incorporated place in the lower 48 states. The highest number of calls came predictably from Portland at 27, followed by Vancouver, Washington, and Lake Oswego, Oregon, at ten each.
Almost three fourths of the calls—58—came from subscribers. Fourteen participant brokers, four appraisers, and three personal assistants called. One call was received from a non-member in central Oregon, looking for information about joining RMLS™.
The Help Desk technicians were able to resolve all but one of the 80 calls that same day. One call concerning a browser problem was carried over for resolution the next day. In that case, a session for the technician to use a remote desktop was scheduled the following day to delve further into the problem.
More than eighty percent of those 80 calls received on December 15th were handled by the Help Desk technicians. Most of the other 15 callers were referred to internal RMLS™ resources, primarily the Accounting, Membership, and Data Accuracy staff. In only three cases were subscribers redirected to other entities. On this day those were AOL, RPR, and SentriLock.
Fifty-four of the calls were about some functionality in RMLSweb, including 20 calls about password issues and 16 about Listing Load. These two areas are consistently at the top of the call topics list. Other RMLSweb questions concerned searching of various kinds (4), report printing (3), inventory (2), and tax ID (2), leaving seven other unique RMLSweb questions. Other areas our answer folks provided help in were SentriLock (9), membership (6), Data Accuracy (4), and training classes (2). There were five calls about other topics such as transaction forms, RPR and IDX.
It was a full day of questions and answers at the Help Desk on Monday, December 15th, just like it is on most days. Thank you, Help Desk!
Next time we will talk about disaster recovery/business continuance planning at RMLS™. If you have any questions you would like to have answered, I encourage you to post a comment to this blog post.
