Annual Forms Change: The Details

by Heather Andrews | May 24, 2013 | RMLSweb

As noted in last week’s preview of the forms changes coming this year to RMLSweb, the RMLS™ Forms Committee meets each year to review subscriber suggestions and recommend changes to RMLSweb listing input forms. After changes are approved by the RMLS™ Board of Directors, our staff works diligently to execute the changes as soon as possible.

We’re just about ready to unveil the results of this annual project! Here are a few of the biggest differences you’ll notice after the changes go live:

• Public Remarks Increased: the Public Remarks field will increase in size from 380 to 440 characters.
• Farm Y/N?: a new Farm Y/N field will be available for residential listings. Removing FARM from the property type field will allow the Property Type of Detached or Residential-Manufactured to be selected. Choosing Y will provide the Farms Supplement form, which can be used by the listing agent to fully describe the property.
• Offer/Negotiation: the Offer/Negotiation field will now be required. This field indicates instructions for presenting offers and negotiations, such as Call Listing Agent, Listing Agent Only, Seller Directly, or See Documents.
• Map Coordinates: the Map Page, Map Column, and Map Row fields (which make up Map Coordinates) will remain required for listings in the following counties: Clackamas, Columbia, Curry, Lane, Multnomah, Washington, and Yamhill. In all other areas, it will be optional.
• Export Reports: Export Reports will have additional fields added to the end of reports.

We’ve prepared more documentation for those who wish to read more detail. View a brief summary document of the annual forms change, and a color-coded PDF showing changes to the Data Input Forms and Listing Contracts.

We’ll be updating two other small projects as well. First, we’ll be tweaking the Hotsheet Search to include an option to search for a specific price change amount. Agents will soon be be able to run a Hotsheet Search (left) to find listings that have increased or decreased in price.

Finally, we’ll also be restoring four hour session times! Our Unauthorized Access project reduced session times in February, meaning accounts were logged out after 90 minutes of inactivity. Subscriber feedback prompted RMLS™ to reconsider, and we’re restoring the previous four hour sessions.

Changing so many pieces of RMLSweb requires a longer outage than our regular monthly maintenance. We expect these changes to require a lengthy outage—possibly as long as 12 hours. As with our regular maintenance outages, a Maintenance Mode version of RMLSweb will be available, available to subscribers only for search purposes.

RMLS™ puts much thought and care into developing the best system for regional REALTORS®. We hope our subscribers appreciate this work and will continue to share comments and questions!