RESO for Brokerages: 4 Ways New Standards Will Shape Your Future

The key to the success for the future of all real estate brokerages will be data standards. This is not hyperbole, it is a fact, and let me explain why.

Today real estate brokerages struggle with profitability. Shrinking margins have become the business norm. To keep up, brokerages and franchises have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in new technology for their businesses. Yet research has shown that one of the biggest pain points that brokerages and franchises face is that overall the technology they use doesn’t “talk” to each other. This is inefficiency at its best.

Brokerages often struggle to incorporate MLS data into their back office solutions, websites and other software tools and apps. It's a heady challenge for their tech teams and their technology partners. For brokerages and franchises serving multiple markets, their external technology challenges are compounded, because until the RESO Data Dictionary is used industry wide, each MLS offers slightly different property fields and information on their IDX, VOW, and broker back office data feeds. Brokerages therefore have to spend significant resources in both labor and funding to not only ingest this information but also normalize it throughout the various technologies they use internally. At times, the cost to do so is prohibitive to the point that brokers don’t have normalized data through their various technology products and services.

So here’s the rub: All of the time and money by brokerages and franchises that is going towards these data efforts are taking time and money away from their efforts to recruit, retain, train and support their agents and provide innovative solutions to increase the number of transactions and overall profitability. There is nothing more vital to a brokerage than recruiting and retaining their agents, yet, unnecessarily, dollars are being sucked away because of the lack of technology standards within a brokerage.