Bright MLS, CRMLS, and MRED Collaborate on Offering Choice in Showing Management
“Leaders from each MLS stressed that this is neither a consolidation nor an attempt to own any showing service provider. Rather, it is a collaborative effort to offer brokers and agents options in how they handle showings via the MLS.
“We want to offer an API to unite showing solutions across the entire residential real estate industry in North America,” said Art Carter, CEO of CRMLS. “Whether a broker subscribes to one or more than one MLS, their challenge is working with numerous showing platforms that don’t talk to each other.”
“This project gives showing services a Rosetta stone,” Carter added. “It enables easy translation between different showing service ‘languages.'”
Love this. I have so many questions, and how this might be implemented to other solutions.
if you take a look at the Ontario regional matrix (ITSO : Information Technology of Southern Ontario), you’ll see that each Broker Office has a choice! of which Showing Service they prefer. From there, it’s a ‘simple’ smartlink on the listing which puts the buyers agent directly into the receiving showing system to book an appointment. They currently have 6 choices; the smartlink is standard across the systems so not difficult to implement.
This has come up so many times as we’ve been researching showing services. It would be amazing to give members their choice of service, but it ends up creating headaches and fragmenting the system. For example, if a buyer’s broker wants to create a tour of multiple showings, but one of the properties is on Service A and the other property is on Service B, then they can’t create the tour. Or, worse yet, a listing broker allows both Service A and Service B on their listing, and someone schedules a showing at 10 am on Service A, but Service B doesn’t get that memo and allows someone else to also schedule at 10 am.
An API where these services can pass this information back and forth would be amazing. Very happy to see these MLS big guns get together to throw some weight at the problem.